Euan Adie has just put up onto the web an early version of Streamosphere, which lets you track scientific discussion on the web, in real time. This visualization/aggregation tool is preliminary, but it currently tracks about 4,000 accounts on half a dozen different social media sites including Friendfeed, Twitter and bookmarking services like Delicious. The account owners have all self-identified (sometimes implicitly) as scientists or people interested in science.
Euan explains more, with screenshots, in a post at Nascent, the NPG web publishing department’s blog. He writes: “I’m collecting hashtags, tags and extracting key terms from all updates but don’t quite know what to do with them yet – still need a good algorithm to detect trending topics. Links are extracted from updates but right now there’s no disambiguation for papers….There’s no API but if anybody has a good use for the data I’m happy to set something up using GNIP or long polling to support real time updates if necessary – just send me a use case.” Please do take a look and let Euan have your feedback and questions. I’ve already asked him if he is a one-man Google Wave.