Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Agenda:

• bioinformatics.org
• derek lowe on corante
• chriscmooney.com science journalist
• recently scientific journals have gotten into blogs. nature magazine has 3 now. links to latest articles, commentary on articles in their and other journals. news stories. comment-enabled. usually the articles are restricted access ie to academic multi-licensed users.
• preprint archive at cornell is now using trackbacks. shows blogs that are citing papers.
• science group blogs. people take turns running it for a couple weeks each.
• also wikis. openwetware for biologists. started at mit now expanded.
• directories, ie scienceport.org, phdweblogs.net syndic8, newsisfree
• connotea.org: social bookmarking for scientists. links to articles, websites, blogs.
• science library blogs: stql.info, englib.info, confessions of a science librarian, science library pad, science library update, sla pam division blog.
• his blog blogs.law.harvard.edu rowland institute library. links to and commentary on science resources, articles of interest, news & info on rowland research, harvard community news for rowland community members. they don’t just link to the article, but also enhancing the info by a short analysis, liunking several related items together. complementary info, build on news announcements.
• blogs are still evolving. libraries can use as reference an d communications tool.
• (in response to Q) – yes, my blogging for rowland is supported by the institute, and encouraged, and viewed as a resource of the organization.
• some discussion among many folks in room of overcoming people’s perceptions of what a blog is. do scientists see blogging as a time sink rather than being in the lab? or do they view it as a very efficient way to communicate to a mass audience? do they worry that appealing to popular audience will lessen their academic credibility? is it then harder for scientists who are not already acknowledged as superstars?
• what about concerns of publication and spilling the beans too early? could blogging ever be considered a legitimate form of academic publication?

• what is knowledge management? storing and organizing data so it’s availanble for later use. (knowledge provides context to make data useful. that context is itself data.) can be personal or for others.
• why use a blog for that?
• allows you not only to save a link to something but to add a note about why you want to remember it and the most salient aspects.
• blogs are easy to use. you don’t need to have any special tech skill. easily searchable and browsable.
• some quick discussion of the idea that it’d be neat to create an auto archive of the site you are linking to, and if there’d be IP implications…
• blogs make it easy to link things by category, to tag, to make community searching easier, to keep found things found
• some drawbacks: limited export options. content locked in often to proprietary software. software may not be completely ideal for the data. sometimes a spreadsheet etc. is better. blogs may be a hard sell for others. especially when many ppl still view them as personal diaries.
• examples of knowledge management on blogs: shimonologue for catgegory tree. j’s scratchpad for departments, search engine, calendar feature, easy date scheme. blogger blogs for list of previous posts in sidebar.
• how do ppl use blogs?
• ex: park library news. blogging of conferences (sla, asist-k for example).
• what about feeds?
• feeds can be routed to different places. not just for end users. can be put on websites, can be put into group aggregators, can be categorized. feeds are not static which can soemtimes be a disadvantage. group aggregators can be tricky. some aggregators will not keep data.
• web based aggregators: bloglines is an example. some blog software has attached aggregators. aggregators can be public or private.
• desktop aggregators: netnewswire, pluck, blogbridge
• k-logs: bill ives, knowledge jolt w jack, mathemagenic, excited utterances, babson knowledge
• BI: what are the cognitive aspects of using a blog? what do you gain from using it as a tool? text is an active medium, etc…. supports analytical thinking.
• KM is about the practitioner not the tool. more important to get ppl involved in the process and give incentive for them to use iot than to find a super snazzy tool.
• BR: do any blogs pay people to post? (some examples cited ie people blogging on the job, blog journalism as job, marquee payments ie what Sooz did, comp movie tickets, that sort of thing).
• br is looking for a model of mass microcredit payments to contributors to blogs ie what if slashdot paid people who make good comments etc.
• BI: marquee pays ppl to write about products. vespa gives some good bloggers-about-vespas some in kind gifts.