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Tell us what we should develop next on Nature Network
Corie Lok
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 20:06 UTC
What new features do you want us to create for you on Nature Network? Post any ideas here. This is meant to be your site!
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The restriction on posting events to the approved cities keeps an effective stranglehold on which events can be discussed. However, this restriction also seems to limit the usefulness of Nature Networks. I’m heading to Cancun Mexico this evening to attend the Society for Developmental Biology meeting and I would have liked to use nature Networks to pre-connect with other attendees, but I knew Nature Networks wouldn’t support a notice regarding a meeting in Mexico — I couldn’t even post a note about the RNA society meeting in Madison, WI a few weeks ago. Is there a software-based reason why the sites are being limited, or is this an administrative decision? Either way, it is an annoying restriction that sets an example of how not to structure a site to foster scientific collaboration.
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I was very much intrested in maintaining ablog in nature network. Unfortunately, I was not confident of meeting the quality control of the moderator. I feel that everyone should be free to maintain a blog as long as it bebefits the scientific community. Keeping restrictions on quality of language and idea may not be beneficial in long term. Not every idea will be appreciated, but some ideas can trigger sparks amongst the readers.
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I am still not sure that Nature Network has an identity. It’s not quite a social networking site, which IMO is still the best way forward. A blog network is probably a good idea, but it should be semi-autonomous, and a proper blog platform (the current one is not ideal). In other words, I don’t want to track blog posts via my network snapshop (that’s what RSS is for), just profiles and perhaps groups/events.
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We really need multimedia streaming in blogs and forums, where we can post some science videos and animation.
None of the social or science network can survive without multimedia.
Cheers,
Amit -
The creation of group should be moderated:
there are already 2 groups about genetics:
http://network.nature.com/group/network-nature-comgroupsgenetics
http://network.nature.com/group/GDEC501B5..about bioinformatics:
http://network.nature.com/group/bioinformatics
http://network.nature.com/group/lifescienceinformaticsetc…
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Pierre, the life science informatics is about more than what is currently called bioinformatics, and basically includes chemoinformatics and chemometrics too.
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What I really miss is a better view on what has changed in my network. Currently, I can get a snapshot, but what I really would like to see is what is new since the last time I was online (using the HTTP server log or cookies or whatever). I know this is a bit more bookkeeping, but saves me from looking at same ‘new’ content each time. This is currently a reason not to use NN as much as e.g. postgenomic or chemical blogspace or scintilla.
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Integration with postgenomic, preceding and scintilla. A way to keep a lab e-book and simple lab management tools.
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Pedro, that might be an interesting idea: Nature hosting ELN… with much content, I have been maintaining a wiki in my previous postdoc, as replacement for the old paper notebook. Allows me to make links etc. I plan to do this in my new postdoc too, maybe even with a RDF-enabled wiki, to have agents automatically verify what I enter for inconsistencies. These things are already possible; just a matter of doing it.
If Nature would host such a service (RDF-enabled, and integrated with their other pages), they have a true killer for me: I write my ELN items, and for each page I decide if I want to make it public; since it is a wiki, I can keep it private until happy about the results, or, simply, until the experiment has finished. Then, by clicking a button it would become CC+attribution and automatically end up in Nature Preceedings. The full integration of Scintilla/Postgenomic/Connotea comes in when making links to background material.
The RDF is important for validating what I write, and I can imagine that Nature has an extensive set of default agents (ofcourse, in addition to spell checking etc :). These agents check if the chemical reaction equations makes sense (conservation of mass, atom count, etc), that NMR/MS spectra and other experimental properties are consistent with that equation, and whatever else we can come up with. The tools for this validation are available, and basically only the glue is missing.
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Nature as a Software as a Service company. It’s an intriguing idea. I seriously doubt that Nature could afford to do a hosted ELN for free. ELNs are not a trivial problem, although given the direction that the company is headed, an ELN implemented in a backpack/socialtext like framework with semantic additions would not be a bad idea.
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