I stumbled across this paper (found on the GBIF Public Library): The first sentence of the abstract makes the paper sound a bit of a slog to read, but actually it's a great fun, full of pithy comments on the state of digital humanities. Almost all of this is highly relevant to mobilising natural history data.

This morning I posted this tweet: My grumpiness (on this occasion, seems lots of things seem to make me grumpy lately) is that often journal RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired. As RSS feeds are a major source of biodiversity information (for a great example of their use see uBio's RSS, described in doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm109) it would be helpful if publishers did a few basic things.

I love Stephen Sondheim musicals. In particular I love the way he can build an ensemble piece in which there can be 10-20 people onstage, apparently singing, shouting, and speaking complete disconnected lines, which nonetheless build into a coherent whole.

Mauro Cavalcanti has released e-Species, "a taxonomically intelligent biodiversity search engine" written in Python that mimics much of the functionality of iSpecies. The project is open source, with a SourceForge page, although no files seem to be available yet. This is the second iSpecies clone I've seen, David Shorthouse having written a clone that uses only JSON.