Science Blogging 2008: London forum: topic
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Continue the conversation here! What will science blogging look like in 5 years?
Corie Lok
Thursday, 04 September 2008 12:49 UTC
Thanks everyone for a great conference on Saturday. Sorry we’ve been a bit quiet here (the NN team has been busy with other pressing things). Videos from the day, details about the challenge, and a roundup of photos/blog posts/etc will be posted here soon. (To start you off, check out all the NN blog posts about the conference here.)
Our conference was only a day and we wanted to keep the sessions running on time so I know there were lots of questions and comments that we didn’t get to. So please continue the discussions here in the forum.
I’ll start off. Where does everyone see science blogging (and online science in general) headed in the next 5 years?
Updated 04 September 2008 12:52 UTC
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Replies
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The themes of data and interconnectedness came up repeatedly at the conference. Data are growing all the time (see _Nature_’s 4 September 2008 issue, for example). In the past, scientific databases have failed shockingly, meaning that many carefully measured, collected, and priceless data have been lost as database infrastructures have crumbled into disuse, archaism, funding blights and incompatibilities. “Science 2.0” is the curator and steward of data, because unlike “1.0”, it can be done in a distributed fashion (with continual updates to formats), whether lists or taxonomies of species, information about chemicals and their reactions, astronomical data, microarrays or a host of others.
One role of blogging might be to act as a front-end or descriptor for these databases (as Jean Claude Bradley and others have articulated).Martin Fenner has begun to put together a list of science blog disciplines, “at his blog here”:=“http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/mfenner/2008/08/31/science-blogging-is-the-new-email#comment-15771” and being refined in the comment thread. I think that the list needs more refinement still, but it begins to provide a clear idea of the many ways in which blogging can be devloped over the next five years.
The increasing use of linking and will also continue, services like Friendfeed (for people) and the semantic web (or whatever it is now called) for machines will be introduced and rapidly evolve. In summ, science 2.0 will be essential in two areas at least: (1) to collect, curate and annotate data in distributed, linked fashion; and (2) to interpret and discuss it – including arguing about it, correcting it, planning next steps and refining protocols, methods and procedures.
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That Martin Fenner link is wrong, sorry. Here it is again.
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Will you bleep out the expletives in the video? I hadn’t realised until Saturday that certain words that are usually offlimits had gone mainstream…
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To answer Corie’s question:
I hope:
- blogging is seen by scientists as ‘good’
- more participation
- more streamlined interconnectivity between publishing/feeding (we’ll finally settle on a handful of publishing and feed infrastructures that everyone will use)
- less futzing around with code, opening/closing windows, formatting, you know, all the time consuming stuff
I fear:
- we will no longer be ‘special’
- overabundance of information/feeling overwhelmed
Note that I do NOT fear being scooped.
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