Category: Technology

I carried out a little ad hoc experiment in social media this week. Having backed up my twitter friends and followers using Tweetake, I figured it was time to make them earn their keep…I jest. No, seriously, I’d downloaded the lists, which come as CSV files you can open in a spreadsheet program, and just for fun I thought I’d sort them into groups, picking science-related tweeps as the first category. By, pure chance, there were 100 scientific twitter users in that list.

Next, step was to cut and paste this list into my blog software and activate the web addresses for these 100 scientific tweeters. I then, of course, posted a tweet to let everyone know I’d compiled a list of twitter users with a scientific bent. Several people retweeted my tweet and I started to get some nice responses, direct messages, blog comments, and emails. Some of these came from twitter friends who had been inadvertently left off the list, so I added them and also activated their twitter name in the list, making it linkable to their twitter profile.

That move then formed the basis of a nice trade – you retweet or comment on the list and I’ll add you if you’re aren’t already on it and if you are I’d activate your twitter name and so it grows. I’ve not counted how many times it has now been mentioned, suffice to say that my local twitterhood continues to grow. Moreover, those people I listed are getting more followers and growing their own twittersphere as well as gaining traffic (several hundred new readers for some) from other social media sites that got into the loop, including StumbleUpon.

So, not caring what Bryony Garden thinks, it was Thursday that I coined a word to describe the scientwisters. That seemed to give the page a new boost in terms of visitors and retweeters.

For those interested in just how much impact this little project has had on my twitterhood. Here’s the twitter counter chart for the last week. The original post ran late on January 5 and was retweeted by various tweeps and scientwitters on the 6th. The chart below is now very out of date, sciencebase now has almost 3500 followers on twitter, partly due to this experiment, and partly thanks to Andrew Maynard’s Mashable article and Guy Kawasaki’s retweets, as well as the (re)tweets and shouts outs of countless scientwific friends on twitter.

It seems that I’m also a member of the twitterati, at least in Cambridge, UK, where, according to Twitter Grader, I am #4 below Bill Thompson, Vero Pepperrell, and Patrick Haney who is notasausage. Also seem to be doing well on twitterholic.

If you’re a scientific twitterer, let me know, either follow me on twitter itself, comment on this post or the original 100+ scientwitters page, or better still, tweet about the list. In return, I’ll add you to the list so we can expand this scientific twitterhood far and wide. By the way, there are now 400+ scientific twitter users on on my list and its still growing.

UPDATE: Sciencebase was placed third in the Shorty Awards science category, apparently that gets me a free ticket to the awards ceremony, but unfortunately won’t pay my airfare or accommodation…regardless thanks for all your nominations and votes!!!

Sciencebase is currently #4 #3 in the Shorty Awards science category, please check out the site and if you think it worthy give us your vote via the awards nomination page or on Twitter.

The Shorty Awards honour the world’s top Twitterers in a variety of categories.

Here’s what nominators have said about sciencebase so far:

“I want 2 nominate @sciencebase in #science, b/c how can u get round twitter sciencebase in this category? He’s gr8 & has wit!” – @laikas

“I nominate @sciencebase for a Shorty Award in #science because he keeps his hand on pulse of science.” – @freesci

“I nominate @sciencebase for a Shorty Award in #science because he’s informative, witty, relevant and kind.” – @Jennifer_P

Your vote would be much appreciated!

I’m still following the social media for scientists trail and asked my good friend Roddy MacLeod of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, who runs the Internet Resources Newsletter whether he had any thoughts on gathering up social media resources and scientists into a directory or other online resource. It would be useful, for instance, to know which scientists are on Twitter, who is using Ning sites and who can be poked, with a testtube, on Facebook.

I asked MacLeod what he thought of the idea of collating all the scientists on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. “The question maybe is whether all the scientists would like to be gathered up. After all, it’s the individual who is in control of his/her own environment in these general social networks, and maybe that’s the way it should be.”

“I did a wee post on some social networking services on the spineless blog, but mostly leave that to SciTechNet and Brian Kelly et al,” he told me. “One thing I reckon is that as social networking sites like IET Discover and 2collab, and others multiply, it’s going to get more difficult for librarians. They can’t be expected to join and participate in all the possible specialised social networks, unless they specialise in a very particular subject, so they’ll end up missing a lot of potentially useful stuff. “There are so many, I can barely keep up,” he confessed, “Some interoperability between them would be great, because otherwise you have to spend time creating a brand-new profile for each one.”

He adds, that we [information scientists and librarians] are in a similar situation as they were with the burgeoning spread of trade journals, but at least librarians could scan those occasionally, so keeping up was easier. Many of the thousands of trade journals are free.

MacLeod echoes a commentator in my previous SM post regarding financing of these sites: “I reckon that only the well-supported social networking services will survive (those backed up by large professional societies or major publishers),” he told me, “Some of the smaller ones may end up like those discussion forums on some sites where no-one actually discusses anything.” There already are plenty of cob-webs on the net. “Yes, there are the very general all-subject ones, the well-supported general ones such as IET Discover and 2collab, some niche ones which are likely to survive,” adds MacLeod, “and some chancer ones that are trying to jump on the bandwagon. This means some wasted effort as we wait to see which ones will take off and survive, but there is no other way.”

MacLeod will soon be busy promoting ticTOCs, which will potentially help all researchers, including those unaware of RSS newsfeeds or who don’t care for that technology and keen RSS aggregators alike. “ticTOCs will serve both types of user in different ways allowing them to keep up-to-date with the research literature.”

To use ticTOCs as a current awareness service, you don’t need to know anything at all about RSS. ticTOCs ingests RSS feeds behind the scenes, but it’s perfectly possible, using ticTOCs to find, display, expand and then save (to the MyTOCs feature in ticTOCs) tables of contents to keep current without any mention or knowledge of RSS. “To me, this is the main use of ticTOCs because,” adds MacLeod, “as a Forrester report recently pointed out many people don’t understand/use/can’t be bothered with RSS. However, for the minority who are happy to use RSS, ticTOCs can be used as a tool to find relevant table of contents feeds, and then export them to the person’s favourite feed reader.”

The important point about RSS and TOCs is described in Lisa Rogers’ article in FUMSI. What librarians and every researcher needs is RSS feeds for journal TOCs. Moreover, publishers must produce TOC feeds in a standardised way, says MacLeod. This will allow both individuals, and services such as ticTOCs and others (see 6 mentioned in IRN) to better utilise feeds, and this in turn will help get current journals better exploited. “What ticTOCs has found is that publishers currently don’t produce journal TOC RSS feeds in a standard way,” MacLeod says, “they insert all sorts of things in various fields, they put the authors in various fields, they often don’t include abstracts, often don’t include the DOI, often don’t cite authors in a standard way, etc.

Rogers’ article goes some way to explaining what publishers should do, and CrossRef will be coming out with more Recommendations for publishers with respect to tables of contents RSS feeds in the future. “This is also very important for publishers because of the increasing emphasis on papers being deposited in Institutional Repositories after 6 months of being published,” adds MacLeod, “So, the publishers need to exploit their current content as soon as possible after publication as possible.”

Welcome fellow twitterers, don’t forget to follow me on twitter, before you read on…

In the current economic climate, the “Downturn” as the BBC has so brazenly logo-ized it, when banks are running and companies are being crunched like so many cornflakes eaten during the breakfast news, tech companies need all the good advice they can get. This is where Guy Kawasaki, entrepeneur, evangelist, venture capitalist, blogger, and guru can help.

Kawasaki’s latest book – Reality Bites – sucks up to no one, but teaches you to suck down, it takes no bull shiitake and overturns much of the received wisdom of Si-Valley. Moreover, Reality Check is the self-professed “irreverent guide to outsmarting, outmanaging, and outmarketing your competition. If Bubble 2.0 is about to burst, then irreverent advice of this kind could mean the difference between a startup never getting off the blocks before reality bites.

Now, I’ve never quite got the hang of speed reading, boredom, tiredness, and aching eyeballs will often mean I take ten times as long as the average reader to plough through a lacklustre book.

With Kawasaki it has been very different. It has been a long read for me (and I’m still not quite finished as I write this review), but that’s most definitely not because of boredom or tiredness, it’s because I’ve been in and out of my chair as he triggers new thoughts and ideas with almost every paragraph. Each page I turn I come across a new idea that I cannot wait to work on, write about, implement, or even just use to create my latest tweet. And I’m not even running a tech startup, if that’s how I feel reading his words, then I suspect anyone hoping to storm the market with a new gadget, program or their latest paper will get even more out of it than me.

If there were some way to read and work at the same time without compromising either, I’d have Guy sitting on my desk every day. His ideas seem to transcend the jargon and bozo explosions of the day, anyone – individual entrepreneur, blogger, fledgling CEO, head of department – would do well to keep him close to hand while they build their business plan, work on their prototype and develop their team.

All of what Kawasaki discusses is about people whether he’s explaining the top ten lies of venture capitalists or how old geezers can capture or enrapture the youth market, whether he’s telling you about how late he came to blogging or how creating a community is not just the latest fad, something scientists are beginning to recognise.

And, that’s no bull shiitake.

You can visit Guy Kawasaki’s website here (and read his blog), get the latest true rumours via his Truemors site, or check out aggregated headlines from top news sources and blogs in almost every field of endeavour you care to mention at Alltop.com, and yes, of course, there is a science.alltop.com

My post on social media for scientists seems to have been received rather well, with a huge amount of traffic and positive responses from various big name commentators across the networks and blogosphere.

Several scientists have already commented about the post over on Nature Networks. Nature’s own Maxine Clarke describe it as “an amazingly useful post” but was worried that there seem to be so many scientific social media clones now available. It is, she says, “It is hard to see them all enduring.” But, that’s not surprising, natural selection and survival of the fittest will kick in. Indeed, it already is happening to a degree. Some of these communities are fast approaching critical mass.

For instance, Joerg Heber is also concerned that there lots of clones and that although the trend is towards increasing fragmentation of our online identities, he points out that SciLink.com now has 44000 users or thereabouts, whereas SocialMD, claims just 3100. “In the end,” he says, “there surely will be a concentration process for all those sites and only a few will survive. There likely will be a self-accumulating user base for the most successful ones, as the more users there are the more sense they make.”

But, compare those figures with the likes of LinkedIn (30 million users) and Facebook (120 million) and one has to wonder what is the purpose of creating a niche community external to such sites, when one might simply create a group within those and have access to potentially millions of like-minded individuals. Indeed, it never occurred to me to create a standalone science writers community online, I simple organised a Facebook science writers group, which now has almost 400 members. Obviously, there are fewer science writers than scientists.

Heber concedes that LinkedIn and Facebook may not be perfectly suited to scientists, but wonders whether the networking sites I listed in the original post really are specific to scientists? “Can you share lab books and wikis?” he asks.

Martin Fenner mentioned ScienceOnline’09, which I do hope to attend (looking for a sponsor, right now). This unconference, which will be for scientists and science communicators alike will, he says, have a session on social networks for scientists, moderated by my good friends Cameron Neylon of Science in the Open and Deepak Singh of bbgm.

Fenner followed up his original comment with the following, pointing out that AAAS Science Careers (Social Networking Grows Up) also had an article on this topic [which I hadn’t seen when I started writing the original Sciencebase post mid-October, db]. “They talk about a few social networking sites for scientists, but somehow fail to mention Nature Network,” Fenner says, “The article also mentions social networking sites set up by universities, including ResearchConnect (University of Manchester) and Small Worlds (University of Leicester). I didn’t know about this (unless you count the Facebook organisation by universities), but it looks like a good idea.”

Brian Willson of the Microsoft Chemical Team Blog gave my post a mention and noted that most of the sites are apparently aimed at academia rather than industry. He was curious to know whether web 2.0 and online communities would impact scientists in industry, a topic he has discussed previously on the MCTB.

44000 members is impressive (for SciLink), but have any of the social media sites for scientists really achieved critical mass yet? By which I mean do they have enough active members to become self-sustaining and useful to science and the communities they serve?

Way back in the 1990s, I used to work for two of the biggest proto-social media sites for scientists – ChemWeb and BioMedNet. The former had more members than the American Chemical Society (which at the time was around 140,000 I believe) and BMN even more at, if memory serves correctly, close to half a million, far more than Facebook and LinkedIn put together!).

Both CW and BMN were incredibly innovative (having been created by Vitek Tracz, chairman of the Science Navigation Group, and founder of the open access publisher BioMedCentral as well as the those two online communities). CW and BMN were running what were essentially blogs alongside their news and features output, providing preprint servers (in the case of Chemweb), member search tools, webinars and online conferences, and access to dozens of resources. Of course, they were never labelled web 2.0. This was, after all well before the .com bubble burst and the web was reborn.

Unfortunately, both CW and BMN were bought up by a giant shareholder-driven publisher (mentioning no names) and driven into the ground once the company realised it wasn’t making enough money from them. Which was a great shame, because they really could have made huge inroads into the very world we are discussing. ChemWeb.com lives on thanks to Chemindustry.com and is thriving in its new form as my regular readers will know from The Alchemist newsletter, but at the moment it is not quite the community-led system it once was.

In some sense, all these new social media sites for scientists are simply reinventing a well-worn wheel from a decade past and whether or not any of them will achieve the significance (at their height) of a Chemweb or a BioMedNet remains to be seen. Offline scientific networks/societies continue to grow as they have done since their earliest days in the nineteenth century and before (their online efforts don’t seem to have yet built the online communities that could exist)

Given that many of the online efforts are insignificantly small in terms of membership numbers compared to the now defunct BMN and compared to the offline presence of the bigger scientific societies, I seriously doubt that more than one or two will survive and thrive. But, we’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps it will take a killer application for one to emerge as a leader and become as essential to scientists as MySpace is to a teenybopper and Facebook is to students. That killer application, however, remains to be revealed.