If you want to know what I’ve been up to, you can read Bora’s blog, because he interviewed me. I talk about what I’m (not) doing now, what I want to do, how I’m a neurotic traveler, my thoughts about the internet and scientists, and how SciBarCamp is clearly way more awesome than ScienceOnline, pretty much. Also, there is a picture of me. So that is what to expect when you click this link

In February I wrote a blog post about FriendFeed, explaining why I thought it was not as wonderful as everyone many ten people say it is. I didn’t post it, because it made me angry all over again about the “OMG, best tool for science communication, EVER”-attitude. I didn’t want to unleash my frustration on the world, so I let the blog post simmer for a bit.

Several months later, I not only stand by all of my original points, but I have more evidence for you to prove my point, which is that Friend Feed is not at all a good tool for scientists to communicate.

Okay, let’s have a look at the start of the post I wrote months ago:

When I decided to leave FriendFeed, I didn’t think that the fact that it made me stressed and unhappy and utterly and completely frustrated and angry was good enough a reason to leave. I don’t do rash decisions. Surely there must be good things about FriendFeed that I wasn’t seeing.

A while ago, Berci Mesko started a Google Spreadsheet list of how FriendFeed is useful to scientists. Ah, there you have it. The reasons to stay. The things that make FriendFeed special and useful. The list is not very long [smirk], so let’s go through it one by one.

Okay, the list got a little bit longer since then, but I won’t go through all 20 items. There were 15 when I did it the first time, and well, you’ll start to see a trend quite soon, so I’ll stop after 10.

1. Funding for ONS challenge
Jean-Claude Bradley got funding from a grant he heard of on FriendFeed. That’s great! However, hearing about things is not unique to FriendFeed. You can hear about things lots of places. If there was no FriendFeed, he might have heard about it elsewhere. In fact, the poster, Bill Hooker, had heard about it elsewhere. FriendFeed is not the main channel of communication for exchanging science information.

2. Making the Wikipedia entry for Open Notebook Science
Okay, so you can use FriendFeed to start a project online and have people comment on it. That’s nice. I like collaborative things. You can also do the same with a blog post, a forum, or even with a wiki on which you can leave notes when you make an edit. Like on Wikipedia. Which, you know, would be the normal platform for people to start and edit a Wikipedia entry…

3. Expanding the reach of live conferences
Alright. I’ll give you this one. The ISMB 2008 conference in Toronto was actively reported on in the FriendFeed room for that conference. It made it possible for people who were unable to attend the conference to get live feedback from people there, even if they didn’t personally know anyone there (eg. could not be kept up to date by e-mail or other personal messages). It was much more coherent than having several people liveblog the event on their own site. Here, FriendFeed actually was a benefit. In fact it was such a success that the model of commenting live on ongoing conferences in FriendFeed has also been used in several subsequent conferences, although all of those were related to science communication, and either organized or heavily attended by people who were already into the whole “let’s use the internet to talk about science”-thing. ISMB was a little more special in that regard: it was a big international, data-swapping, conventional scientific conference. Still, only a very small number of participants used the room, but the FriendFeeders very clearly acknowledged this in the paper they published about it afterward. Overall, this is a new way of exchanging ideas that could not as easily have been done on another platform. The fact that there is a published article about this strengthens that this use of FriendFeed is new and special.

Spoiler alert: this was the only thing in the list that I thought was unique to FriendFeed, and it still is. But, oh, how sad… In the mean time, I have discovered something that makes FriendFeed suddenly a whole lot less interesting to use for note taking at live conferences. You see, when FriendFeed changed the layout of the site, I was finally able to find out how to delete my account. And when I did, all the posts and comments I had ever left anywhere on FriendFeed disappeared with me. Including the notes I took at conferences. HAHAHA!! Oh, sorry. I’m sorry, that my personal decision to delete my account has completely screwed up your brilliant system. How thoughtless of me. How rude to interfere with this well-oiled machine that is user-generated data. On the bright side, the FriendFeed-archived notes are so hard to find again that nobody will notice that some items are missing!

Okay, let’s continue a bit more. It will get boring very soon, but you can handle a few more just to get an idea of the general trend.

4. Quick CID to CAS lookup
This is an example of how you can ask a question on Twitter and then have someone else reply to that Twitter question and port their Twitter stream to FriendFeed, where someone comments on it with the solution. It’s kind of like how you can post a question on a message board or on your own blog or on Ask Metaflter and maybe someone else might accidentally run into it on Google or through a link from someone else’s blog and know the answer and be kind enough to pass it on to the original asker.
It’s just another one of those things that happen all over the internet and the fact that this time it happened on FriendFeed is not something that makes the site especially unique. It is, however, a nice example of how FriendFeed is very good at detaching answers from questions and splitting up conversations so that they are incredibly difficult to follow. But thankfully we’re not collecting those. That list would be unmanageably long.

5. Collection of Scientific FriendFeed examples
This very list was collected on FriendFeed. That makes sense. I mean, if you’re going to reach the 12 people who honestly think FriendFeed is useful to science, then I suppose FriendFeed would be the way to contact them all.

6. Publication of conference report
Yes dears, this is wonderful, but I just gave you that one point already at number 3. I’m not counting it again. The resulting paper is because number 3 on this list was the only useful one so far. The paper itself is not an additional useful aspect of FriendFeed.

7. FriendFeed’s References Wanted Room
This is a room in FriendFeed where people who don’t have access to certain journals they need, can leave a message and others can check if they have it at their library and send it along. Ignoring the fact that this is possibly illegal, the concept itself is definitely useful. But. This can be done on other sites. This can easily be run as a forum, or MUCH much better at a dedicated website where people can send each other messages with attachments without revealing their e-mail address to strangers on the internet. FriendFeed is clearly a platform on which this can be done, but I don’t think it’s the best one for the job. Also, the entire concept relies too much on altruism. That’s lovely, but not likely to work well for anything in the long run. If this room were truly a popular place, you would soon notice it overflowing with needy greedy people who only want papers and are not willing to look them up for others. It’s not there yet, because in internet terms it’s not that popular. That is because it’s on FriendFeed, though. It’s not the best platform to be successful, but it works as a result of its own unpopularity.

8. Sorting PubMed articles on Impact Factor (also )
Okay, so you can use FriendFeed to start a project online and have people comment on it. That’s nice. I like collaborative things. You can also do the same with a blog post, a forum, or – wait, I have this terrible feeling of déjà-vu

9. Survey of the proteins on Wikipedia
Okay, so you can use FriendFeed to start a project online and have people comment on it. That’s nice. I like collab- wait, I have this terrible feeling of déjà-vu.

10. Finding collaborators to help with preparation of a beam time proposal
I have this terrible feeling of déjà-vu, again

And it just went on, and on, and on, and on like that.

FriendFeed does exactly the same as any message board or e-mail list or wiki or forum: it lets people communicate with each other. What it brings new to the table is the uncanny ability to completely rip apart any potentially coherent discussion into uncoordinated rambling in three to four different locations. They’re often the same people participating in all places, saying “for more on this, go here!” quite a lot. If you like clicking on links and going nowhere, then FriendFeed really is the perfect tool. You might be, too.

I’ve been accused (by Richard “look at pictures of my garden and this dead pig” Grant ) of “not blogging”. Apparently my pictures don’t count as blog posts.

But it’s true, I’ve been avoiding lengthy posts. What do you want me to write about? I’m no longer in the lab, so accounts of PBS-soaked lab journals or eppie-blisters just don’t exist anymore. I have been reading scientific papers once in a while, but for a purpose, and the purpose was not “to blog about them”. Besides, I’ve never been one to blog about things in the literature. I’m more of the look at these cool pictures! -type.

I suppose I could be a better curator of the easternblot Flickr group. I get them all in RSS, and only privately enjoy them instead of showcasing them on my other, also neglected, blog. Worst gallery owner ever. I guess I can scratch that off my potential future job list.

My current job, which was only a six-month contract, ends end of this month, so as of next week I’ll be mostly unemployed. This entire year was supposed to be some kind of transition year, to try freelancing and think about research, and I’m already at a totally different place than six months ago. At the end of December, after my defense, I wanted to do anything but work in a lab. Now I still don’t want to work in a lab, but I’m a bit more specific about what I do want. I don’t want to blog about that now, though, so there’s another blog topic gone.

The next couple of weeks I will be only minimally involved in science, but maybe that kick-starts a stream of blog ideas. I actually have ideas, I just haven’t written anything out because the ideas are too big for blog posts. Stories where every sentence makes me jump up in my seat, grab your arm, and excitedly add “Oh, and that is related to….” I can’t write those in blog length posts. I tried. The Erdos post was actually the shortest possible version of an idea I have about a centralized database for anyone involved in any field of academia (not PubMed, but PubEverything). An actual post would take too long, but I don’t think my message was very clear from my “look at this XKCD comic”-style post. It’s what I do, you see, I just show pictures.

And that is why I haven’t blogged properly.

So this is what I’ve become: I’m blogging about not blogging. The one thing I swore I would never do.

(P.S. Re: the title. Not only am I currently in my “in between” days, I have also been wearing out the Ben Folds version of the song on my iPod lately.)

One of the final open questions on the exit survey for SciBarCamp Toronto 2009 was “What was your favourite part of SciBarCamp?”. This is a word cloud of the collective answers to that question:

Oh, they’re never going to get this through peer review in time. Although I guess they’ll upload it to ArXiv.

(Erdős number on Wikipedia )

Legend has it that many people who published in other disciplines can also be linked to Erdős, but it’s very hard to figure out. At least you can use the Oracle to find out the Bacon number between actors. There should be a single database of all authors on scholarly papers. Pubmed can be mined, but that’s only life sciences and their closest friends.

I was one of the first members of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Refute and Above Average Physique (scroll all the way down to members at large on the original site), but they updated their website for the first time in years and suddenly they’re everywhere again. Plus, I earned a new badge or two in the mean time, so let’s look at my sash:

The explanations are all on the site.

(I should probably explain these two : I’ve given 50 ml Falcon tubes to a Girl Scout troop when I visited them to talk about the science of ice. (I should get bonus points for actually talking about science to real scouts!) And the martini badge is the result of something very common to certain fields: “Oh, I definitely have time to go to this happy hour – I don’t need to split my cells until 10 PM, so I’ll drink before and then go back to the lab.”)

This is a picture from when I studied at Hogwarts.

And this was when we did the Sorting Hat Ceremony and I was put in Ravenclaw.

Thanks guys!
I had enough people vote for Squishy Cow to make it to the semi-finals of the Quarks .

The other Nature Network blog that made this round is The Primate Diaries , and NN-er Christie got in twice with Observations of a Nerd . I’d like to think that it’s because we’re awesome, but in reality this was a popularity contest and a matter of who remembered to ask their readers to vote.

We’re in the judging round now, so it’s no longer a matter of who can best convince their friends to click on a voting form. Good thing too, because I don’t think I can pull this off again! I love my friends, but their online attention spans are very short. That’s not offensive – it’s kind of admirable how they manage to stay away fr— Ooooh, a shiny website!!

[Two hours of web-surfing later]

Anyway, despite my qualms about things for which you need many friends (of the web-clicking kind), and how unfair they are (the popularity contest, not the friends), I do really like the variety in the final set of semi-finalists. There are submissions from almost every field, and a couple of more general science ones. Some are very serious, some are funny. It’s too bad the list isn’t linked, because (Update – it’s linked now!) this is a cool set of posts to read, I think. The next round is announced later this week, but I’m happy just to be in that company.

Update: I didn’t make it to the finals, but Christie and Eric did! Congratulations!

What a horrible selfish thing to break a blog break for, but I wanted to let you know, (in a winking, insinuating manner) that two of my blog posts are up for voting at the 3quarksdaily science blog awards this week. There are a gazillion blog posts (give or take) but only the top 20 of the popular vote will go on to the next round.

My blog title is listed as “Nature Network” in the poll, but I’ve asked for it to be changed, so you can find my posts either under the letter N or E.
A Squishy Topic (with Squishy Cow!) and Last Saturday are the ones I submitted, because they are my favourites. I know they’re at least one other person’s favourite(s), because people-who-are-not-me have submitted both to Open Lab on other occasions, so please re-show your support!

Back to catching up with my life now. My parents are visiting next week, to watch me be spoken to in Latin while I’m wearing black robes, but after they’re gone I’ll resume the blog.

Suprise blog break!

I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’ll still/again be blogging at two other places, though, in case you really miss me.