I have long been an advocate of Friendfeed as a great tool for researchers. Here I discuss the new Friendfeed clone built for researchers, ScienceFeed, suggest what it is good for and what its weaknesses are.

Image by dullhunk via Flickr One of the great things about being invited to speak that people don’t often emphasise is that it gives you space and time to hear other people speak.

Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr It hasn’t been a real good week for peer review.

Image via Wikipedia Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good practice, or writing decent code. And you shouldn’t take Greg to task for some of the dodgy demos I’ve done over the past few months either.

Towards the end of last year I wrote up some initial reactions to the announcement of Nature Communications and the communications team at NPG were kind enough to do a Q&A to look at some of the issues and concerns I raised. Specifically I was concerned about two things.

Over the holidays I set up my own web presence both to be able to put more content and tools up and also to explore how I present myself as a scientist on the web. In a Semantic Web world where I am represented by a URL, what should that URL look like?

A talk given at the Edinburgh University IT Futures meeting late in 2009. The talk discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Wave as a tool for research and provides some pointers on how to think about using it in an academic setting. The talk was recorded in a Wave with members of the audience taking notes around images of the slides which I had previously uploaded.

Nat Torkington, picking up on my post over the weekend about the CRU emails takes a slant which has helped me figure out how to write this post which I was struggling with. He says: As I responded over at Radar, yes I am absolutely calling for social software for scientists, but I didn’t mean to say that we could expect it to help us find the visionaries amongst the simply wrong. But this raises a very helpful question.

I’ve avoided writing about the Climate Research Unit emails leak for a number of reasons. Firstly it is clearly a sensitive issue with personal ramifications for some and for many others just a very highly charged issue. Probably more importantly I simply haven’t had the time or energy to look into the documents myself. I haven’t, as it were, examined the raw data for myself, only other people’s interpretations.

A presentation given at Newcastle University discussing the challenges of capturing research process and how experimental science might be wired into the linked data web.