This will probably tempt fate, but I've an invited manuscript in review for Briefings in Bioinformatics on the topic of identifiers in biodiversity informatics.

Stumbled across Project Xanadu, Ted Nelson's vision of the way the web should be (e.g., BACK TO THE FUTURE: Hypertext the Way It Used To Be). Nelson coined the term "transclusion", including one document in side another by reference.

Some thoughts on the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life. I am being deliberately critical. This is a high profile project with tens of millions of dollars in funding, lots of people involved, and is accompanied by some of the most overblown hype in organismal biology.

The first release of the Encyclopedia of Life is officially live today. I have promised to be very good...

My short note on the LSID Tester tool has been published in the Open Access journal Source Code for Biology and Medicine. The article has just come out so the DOI (doi:10.1186/1751-0473-3-2) isn't live yet, the direct link is http://www.scfbm.org/content/3/1/2/. Source code for the tester is available from Google Code.

In the absence of a proper bug reporting system, I'm going to use this post to collect errors in the TBMap project, which maps taxonomic names in TreeBASE onto names in other databases.TaxonIDTaxonNameNotesT57654LycorideaeErroneously agrep matched to the spider family Lycosidae, this is a plant tribe.T56449Ficus uncinatabad agrep to Pinus uncinata

CrossRef have released a tool for bloggers to look up DOIs and insert them into blog posts:So far the tool is only available for WordPress blogs.

Wired 16.01 has an article entitled The Data Wars by Josh McHugh. A quote from the printed version:It's a sobering read for those of us who advocate harvesting data from as many sources as possible, more so in light of Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo. Yahoo provides free access to many of its tools via an API (such as the image search I use in iSpecies, and in this sense is much more open than Google. Might this change under Microsoft...?

Dave Lunt has a nice post on How to visualize a phylogeny with thousands of tips?. Dave lists 12 things that his ideal phylogenetic tree viewing tool should do, and invites comments. It will be interesting to see what comes of this...

Came across the paper "Using incomplete citation data for MEDLINE results ranking" (pmid:16779053, fulltext available in PMC .The authors applied PageRank (the algorithm Google use to rank search results) to papers in MEDLINE and found that PageRank is robust to information loss. In other words, even if a citation database is incomplete it will do a good job of ranking results.