Dear Nature Networkers

As producers and consumers of web technology, I thought the following event might be of interest:

The XML Summer School returns this year at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford from 20th-25th September 2009. As always, it’s packed with high quality technical XML training for every level of expertise, from the Hands-on Introduction through to special classes devoted to XQuery and XSLT , Semantic Technologies , Open Source Applications , Web 2.0 , Web Services and Identity . The Summer School is also a rare opportunity to experience what life is like as a student in one of the world’s oldest university cities while enjoying an extensive range of social events that are a part of the unique summer school experience.

Unless you count editorials (DOI:10.1038/442848a), I think this might be one of the first publications that is a direct result of scifoo.

We wrote a little review paper about Connotea and other tools that we think are helping digital libraries to become more personal, sociable, integrated and accessible places. It talks about these tools and how they might fit into Science 2.0 See below.

So thanks are due to Timo Hannay for inviting me, I don’t think I could have written the paper without all the inspiration I got at scifoo.

Duncan Hull, Steve Pettifer and Douglas B. Kell (2008) Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10):e1000204+. DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204

First up, thanks to Matt Brown, Corie Lok , Li Kim Lee , Anna Kushnir and Timo Hannay for organising such a fun and memorable event last weekend.

Thanks also to all the people who took the time to host interesting sessions and unconference topics.

I promise to post more content here at Nature Network, in the meantime, nature networkers might be interested in Famous for fifteen people (some notes from sciblog 2008).

(Marilyn Monroe picture by Andy Warhol and oddsock )

Until the next time…

A thought experiment with lots of money

Fantasy Science Funding is a fun game that anybody can play. You select a Science funding body of your choice, imagine yourself as its all powerful chief executive, and decide which areas of scientific research you would “hire and fire”. What could be easier? Here is how it works…

Conferences are usually fun, and Science Foo Camp 2007 was no exception. Having just recovered from the jetlag and sleep deprivation, I realise other conferences attended to date are bronze and silver by comparison to scifoo, which sets a gold standard. Here are some moments that help to illustrate why Scifoo’s Gold.

The second scifoo camp organised by Nature Publishing Group, O’Reilly and Google is fast approaching. I’m looking forward to attending and meeting all the other foo campers, who look like an eclectic bunch of scientists. It will also be fun to have a look around the Googleplex headquarters in California and experience an unconference style event. According to some of the promotional material, there may be a chance to meet Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. So I’m wondering, given the chance, what interesting questions could you ask them?