Digital identity and questions it raises for scientists
Maxine Clarke
Wednesday, 24 September 2008 07:32 UTC
David Crotty writes a post ‘Digital intimacy’, making some good points (from the perspective of blogging for a protocols journal, CSH Protocols). The post is worth reading in full for views on topics such as reporting (blogging) at meetings and scooping via internet posting, but here’s an excerpt:
..while I do think creating a digital identity is important, the question then becomes, should we all be constantly tweeting our daily activities (”Did 20 minipreps. Had a cup of coffee.”)? As I’ve frequently written in the past, to me it’s a question of time management and personality type. There does seem to be a growing group of biologists on Friendfeed (many are the usual bloggers and web 2.0 evangelists one seems to see everywhere). Lurking around the site, there are occasionally helpful, if shallow, discussions of methods and daily laboratory activities, but the majority of it seems to be chatting about the news, web 2.0, life as a scientist, etc. If you’re of a personality type that enjoys this sort of chatting (and yes, I am one), I can see how joining an online community like this could be fun. I’m not convinced that it’s the best tool for getting your specific question answered in an accurate and immediate manner. It seems more about social interaction than it is a practical resource for the work parts of your life.
[Disclaimer: I bookmarked this blog post by David Crotty last week but have been unable to post about it until now. Apologies, therefore, if the subject is being discussed elsewhere on Nature Network in the meantime.]
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Slighlty modified copy of my comment at David’s place:
I wanted to pick up on the comment about Friendfeed and protocols (speaking as one of the usual bloggers and web2 evangelists):
“There does seem to be a growing group of biologists on Friendfeed (many are the usual bloggers and web 2.0 evangelists one seems to see everywhere). Lurking around the site, there are occasionally helpful, if shallow, discussions of methods and daily laboratory activities, but the majority of it”
I think this is because you are expecting that community to be providing the wrong thing. Ask a question about exactly how to implement some sort of software tool for bioinformatics and you will get very rapid detailed and helpful responses.
On real lab protocols you get very little because you have a relatively small group of diverse scientists – who have relatively little, methodogically speaking, in common. The community isn’t big enough and concentrated enough to provide answers.
So what this means is that you do have to spend effort to both find and build the ‘trusted network’ that is relevant to your needs. For the question ‘how much KCl do I need’ that network probably isn’t available at Friendfeed. For ‘does the latest Calais offering provide an advantage for my bioinformatics analysis pipeline’ or ‘where is the latest discussion on the OA citation advantage (or lack thereof) happening’ it certainly is.
A lot of it is the equivalent of dropping into people’s offices or sharing a cup of coffee. The investments you make in maintaining your trusted network within your physical environment. So yes, a lot of noise perhaps and something that you need to balance. But at least here I can turn off someone if they aren’t contributing to what I need – try keeping that pesky cow-orker out of your office with their latest hare-brained scheme.
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I would add that in my opinion Cameron’s points about FriendFeed apply also to Nature Network. I’ve seen lots of examples of highly specific questions being answered on NN in the way Cameron describes for FF. I agree that there are limitiations for NN and FF along lines discussed here. But NN and FF aren’t the same: they both have the same nice feature of discussion of a partiular question or “article at a URL somewhere”, but they differ in other ways, eg FF is an aggregator into which you can import your other internet activities (eg Flickr, Twitter, blogs) whereas NN itself supports blogs and groups. (There are other differences.)
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One of the things I am finding interesting at the moment is the way the we (scientists and associated groupies) seem to take radically different functionality (e.g. Friendfeed and NN) and then bend them to do rather similar things.
It’s as though there is some underlying communication need which none of these services quite satisfies. To me Friendfeed gets it right in as much as the discussion is focussed on an object – and the conversational element is nearly perfect – yet the filtering of the objects I see is somehow suboptimal. The social filtering aspect is good but the subject/relevance filtering is ropey.
For me the conversational element on NN doesn’t work – there isn’t any functionality that brings me back to see where the conversation has got to. The community is good – the subject matter interesting – but you are always one link removed from the nub of the conversation (two if you count the fact that what usually brings me in is a link posted on Friendfeed).
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The conversational element on NN works in certain limited circumstances. Well, two that I know of! One is that if you start a conversation, any subsequent replies/additions to it get captured on your snapshot in the middle tab (“your topics”). The other is the NN consolidated feed – a Yahoo pipe created by Euan. Put this into your RSS feed and you will see all forum posts (and number of replies).
NN does not, so far as I can see, allow you to track conversations on blogs. Yet.I agree with you on your assessment of FF, Cameron. I’d suggest that the conversations don’t get automaticlly aggregated, eg today there is a link about academia.edu, and in the thread Richard A has manually provided links to two other FF conversations about the same site. So FF is also relying on users’ memories (as does NN) to “network” in this lateral sense. (Goes back to the “aggregating conversations” session at Science Blogging 08). Another aspect of FF that seems slightly clumsy (though could be me not understanding how to use it properly!) is that a room displays content as one long string of links. Yes, if someone adds a comment to one of them, it moves to the top which is nice. But it seems to me that a search and/or tagging fuction would be nice, eg along lines of the NN tagging and searching.
I write these comments in the context of finding both NN and FF excellent services, by the way. And as they are both still evolving, I imagine these types of issues will be solved somehow, one day.
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Maxine, the friendfeed tagging thing is an interesting one. I suggested it several times but no-one else seemed to want it. Concensus seemed to be that if you wanted to tag something you bookmarked it in delicious (which I need to do properly). Its as though people think that you can only tag ‘objects’ (i.e. URLs) and not conversations but IMO the conversations are usually the interesting and high information content part.
Search does exist on FF and is pretty good but only text based – but I’ve seen a few people comment that for some things a FF search in ‘everybody’ can be better than Google (primarily looking for recent items and quotes on things that the users find interesting obviously).
My personal feeling is that at some point we’ll be able to pull everything we want to follow into some sort of uber inbox – with all the functionality of the service it originates on. But we are some way away from that at the moment.
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I think tagging via an external bookmarking service is one step too far for most people (eg me) – a tag within a page/service you are using is quick; although these bookmarking sevices are also quick, it is one more additional task, window, etc.
I agree that the conversations based on ideas can be stimulating and of interest (if the contributors are constructive and on-topic), and I can see the advantages of linking them in a more efficient way than happens now to provide a collection that is a “topic focus”.
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I find the bookmarking services are good for other purposes, by the way, eg collecting/storing links to references (articles) and sharing those. But I wouldn’t want to use them just to tag something “on the fly” compared with being able to tag within the service I’m using.
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