Cameron Neylon

As I mentioned yesterday and [Shirley Wu picked up
on](http://shirleywho.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/a-challenge-out-of-science-blogging-2008-encouraging-senior-scientists-to-blog/),
the final session of [Science Blogging
2008](http://network.nature.com/group/sciblog2008) offered a challenge
to the audience (and to anyone else) to get more senior scientists
blogging. The [official announcement is now
live](http://network.nature.com/forums/sciblog2008/2347) -- and a free
trip to next year's Science Foo Camp the ultimate prize.


As I mentioned yesterday and Shirley Wu picked up on, the final session of Science Blogging 2008 offered a challenge to the audience (and to anyone else) to get more senior scientists blogging. The official announcement is now live – and a free trip to next year’s Science Foo Camp the ultimate prize.

Science blogging challenge goes live

So far weâ€™ve had a fun week.
[Jean-Claude](http://usefulchem.blogspot.com) arrived in the UK on
Thursday last, followed up with a talk at [Bath
University](http://www.bath.ac.uk) to people at
[UKOLN](http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/) on Friday. The talk kicked off an
extended conversation which meant we were very late to lunch but it was
great to follow up on issues from a different perspective to that.
Jean-Claude will be making a screencast of the talk available on his
[Drexel-CoAs Podcast
blog](http://drexel-coas-talks-mp3-podcast.blogspot.com/).

On Friday afternoon we headed into London in preparation for Science
Blogging 2008 which was a blast. A very entertaining keynote by Ben
Goldacre of [Bad Science](http://www.badscience.net/) was followed up by
a fascinating series of sessions on everything from Open Notebooks to
connecting up conversations separated in time and space to
[creativity](http://friendfeed.com/e/2d29c912-a146-467d-a680-5c3ec2c11db9/break-out-session-creativity-things-you-can-t-do/),
blogging boredom, and unicycling giraffes. The sessions were great fun
and there was lots of [back chat on
friendfeed](http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science-blogging-2008) but in
many ways the best part of this for me was the chance to meet people (if
in many cases very briefly) that I knew well but had never actually met
in person. Too many to mention all but in particular it was a pleasure
to finally meet [Michael Barton](http://www.michaelbarton.me.uk/),
[Richard Grant](http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/rpg), [Heather
Etchevers](http://humans.scienceboard.net/), [Matt
Wood](http://www.greenisgood.co.uk/), [Graham
Steel](http://mcblawg.blogspot.com/), and many people from NPG as well
as to meet many old friends. There is pretty good coverage of the
meeting itself so I will simply point at the [technorati
tag](http://technorati.com/search/sciblog?authority=a4&language=en) and
be done with that.

I was one of the people on the [final
panel](http://sciencegeekspeak.com/2008/08/31/final-panel-podcast-from-science-blogging-conference/)
with Peter Murray-Rust, Richard Grant, and moderation from Timo Hannay.
This was a fun conversation with lots of different perspectives. I think
the overall conclusion was that the idea that â€˜blogging is bad for
your careerâ€™ is shifting towards â€˜why do you put all this work
in?â€™ There was a strong sense that some people had made real personal
gains out of blogging and online activities and that many organisations
are starting to see it as a valuable contribution. Nonetheless it is not
an activity that is widely valued, or indeed even known about. To this
end the panel offered a challenge â€" to persuade a senior scientist to
start writing a blog. One prize will be to be featured in next yearâ€™s
Open Lab 2008 â€" the best of science writing on the web. The other
prize â€" which caused an extensive collective intake of breath â€" will
be an all expenses paid trip to Scifoo next year for both blogger and
the encourager. The announcement will probably be made with details by
the time I get to post this.

In the pub on the Saturday night, Peter M-R grabbed me and JC and Egon
Willighagen and said â€˜why donâ€™t you come up to Cambridge
tomorrow?â€™ So we all did [and
I](http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/08/31/linking-up-open-science-online/)
and [Egon have
written](http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2008/08/ugichem2cml.html)
briefly about that already. More work to do, and some interesting things
to discuss, which I hope to follow up later.

Sunday afternoon- dash back to Southampton for the introductory dinner
for the [Open Science
Workshop](http://sotonopensciworkshop.wikispaces.com/) held at
Southampton Uni on Monday. This was a really great meeting from my
perspective with a real mix of tools people and â€˜practicingâ€™
scientists, computer scientists, chemists, biologists, and people with
business degrees. There is more at [the
Wiki](http://sotonopensciworkshop.wikispaces.com/) and [on
Friendfeed](http://friendfeed.com/rooms/soton-open-science-workshop-1-9-08)
â€" but this will need a write up of its own. Hopefully slides will be
made available for most of the talks and we will point to them from both
Wiki and Friendfeed.

Tuesday, more meetings and planning, with a great meeting with [Dave De
Roure](http://www.soton.ac.uk/~dder/) of Southampton Electronics and
Computer Science and in particular the PI for the
[MyExperiment](http://www.myexperiment.org) project.Â  Some good stuff
will come out of this â€" and the contact between Dave and
[Chemspider](http://www.chemspider.com) has been made. The MyExperiment
team are keen on delivering more for chemistry so that link will be
important. However I was particularly taken with a throw away comment
Dave made that workflows (and makefiles) have a direct equivalence with
spreadsheets. This made me think immediately of that great divide
between â€˜those who use excel for everythingâ€™ and â€˜those who run
screaming in the other direction and would rather hard code in perl on a
clay tabletâ€™ for analysis. If we could actually leverage the vast
number of analytical spread sheets sitting on a million hard drives we
might be able to do some very interesting stuff. Hopefully more on this
in a future post.

Wednesday we did [some
experiments](http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp207) â€" its mostly up
online now so you can go see if you are interested. And today we are
heading up to London to see the folks at Nature Publishing Group which
should be fun. More opportunity to talk in detail about ideas from
Saturday and the role of the publisher and papers in the future.Â  Had a
lovely lunch with the NPG web publishing people, talks seemed to go
reasonably well, and a quick chat with the people from Nature Chemistry

But it doesnâ€™t stop there. Tomorrow JC goes to [Manchester to give a
talk](http://duncan.hull.name/2008/08/26/open-notebook-science-in-manchester/),
then heads to Edinburgh for the [e-Science All Hands
Meeting](http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/), including a workshop on
â€˜[The Global Data Centric
View](http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/programme/workshop9.cfm)â€™. Then
he heads to Oxford for [another
meeting](http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/events/oii-oxford-e-research-conference-2008)Â 
and [talk](http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/eresearch08/programme.cfm)
before finally heading back to Philadelphia. On Sunday I fly to Toronto,
with a [Nature Network pub
session](http://network.nature.com/groups/toronto/notice/2008/09/02/next-pub-night-with-discussion-panel-on-science-2-0-featuring-timo-hannay-and-michael-nielsen)
on the Sunday evening (wow I am going to be on scintillating form for
that!) followed by [Science in the 21^st^
Century](http://www.science21stcentury.org/) for the following week.

I think we are going to need a rest when we get to our respective homes
againâ€¦


So far weâ€™ve had a fun week. Jean-Claude arrived in the UK on Thursday last, followed up with a talk at Bath University to people at UKOLN on Friday. The talk kicked off an extended conversation which meant we were very late to lunch but it was great to follow up on issues from a different perspective to that. Jean-Claude will be making a screencast of the talk available on his Drexel-CoAs Podcast blog.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

Science blogging challenge goes live

The Open Science Endurance Event – Team JC-C