Cameron Neylon

A thought sparked off by a
[comment](http://network.nature.com/groups/nnbloggername/forum/topics/3053?page=1#reply-7742)
from [Maxine Clarke](http://network.nature.com/people/maxine/profile) at
[Nature Networks](http://network.nature.com) where she [posted a
link](http://network.nature.com/groups/nnbloggername/forum/topics/3053)
to [a
post](http://www.cshblogs.org/cshprotocols/2008/09/18/digital-intimacy/)
by [David Crotty](http://www.cshblogs.org/cshprotocols/). The thing that
got me thinking was Maxine' statement:

> I would add that in my opinion Cameronâ€™s points about FriendFeed
> apply also to Nature Network. Iâ€™ve seen lots of examples of highly
> specific questions being answered on NN in the way Cameron describes
> for FF...But NN and FF arenâ€™t the same: **they both have the same
> nice feature of discussion of a partiular question or â€œarticle at a
> URL somewhereâ€?**, but they differ in other ways,...\[CN- my
> emphasis\]

Alright, in isolation this doesn't look like much, read through both
David's post and the comments, and then come back to Maxine's,Â  but
what struck me was that on many of these sites many different
communities seem to be using very different functionality to *do very
similar things.* In Maxine's words '...discussion of a...paricular URL
somewhere...' And that leads me to wonder the extent to which all of
these sites are failing to do what it is that we actually want them to
do. And the obvious follow on question: What is it we want them to do?

There seem to be two parts to this. One, as I wrote in my response to
David, is that a lot of this is about the coffee room conversation, a
process of building and maintaining a social network. It happens that
this network is online, which makes it tough to drop into each others
office, but these conversational tools are the next best thing. In fact
they can be better because they let you choose *when* someone can drop
into your office, a choice you often don't have in the physical world.
Many services; Friendfeed, Twitter, Nature Networks, Faceboo, or a
combination can do this quite well -- indeed the conversation spreads
across many services helping the social network (which bear in mind
probably actually has less than 500 total members) to grow, form, and
strengthen the connections between people.

Great. So the social bit, the bit we have in common with the general
populace, is sorted. What about the *science*?

I *think* what we want as scientists is two things. Firstly we want the
right URL delivered at the right time to our inbox (I am assuming
anything important is a resource on the web -- this may not be true now
but give it 18 months and it will be) . Secondly we want a rapid and
accurate assessment of this item, its validity, its relevance, and its
importance to us judged by people we trust and respect. Traditionally
this was managed by going to the library and reading the journals -- and
then going to the appropriate conference and talking to peopl. We know
that the volume of material and the speed at which we need to deal with
this is way too fast. Nothing new there.

My current thinking is that we are failing in building the right tools
because we keep thinking of these two steps as separate when actually
combining them into one integrated process would actual provide
efficiency gains for both phases. I need to sleep on this to get it
straight in my head, there are issues of resource discovery, timeframes,
and social network maintenance that are not falling into place for me at
the moment, so that will be the subject of another post.

However, whether I am right or wrong in that particular line of thought,
if it is true that we are reasonably consistent in what we want then it
is not suprising that we try to bend the full range of services
available into achieving those goals. The interesting question is
whether we can discern what the killer app would be by looking at the
details of what people do to different services and where they are
failing. In a sense, *if* there is a single killer app for science then
it *should* be discernable what it would do based on what scientists try
to do with different services...


A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement:  Alright, in isolation this doesn’t look like much, read through both David’s post and the comments, and then come back to Maxine’s,Â

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

Convergent evolution of scientist behaviour on Web 2.0 sites?