In any discussion of data gathering or data cleaning the term "crowdsourcing" inevitably comes up. A example where this approach has been successful is the Encyclopedia of Life's Flickr pool, where Flickr users upload images that are harvested by EOL.

Github for science sounds like a great plan? But do we have the underlying stack of equivalent services needed to provide “http for science” and “tcp/ip” for science. I argue that until we do we will struggle to really deliver on the excitement that examples (rightly) inspire.

For this weeks sessions of my phyloinformatics course I'm developing some phylogeny tools. The first is a simple AJAX-based BLAST tool.

As part of a postgraduate course here at the University of Glasgow I'm teaching five sessions on "phyloinformatics", which I've decided to define broadly enough to encompass most of biodiversity informatics. Given that this module is being developed on the fly, and will make use of lots of little "toys" I've developed and discussed on this blog, I've decided to put the course notes online, along with the interactive demos and the source code.

Inspired by a comment on my post Visualising edit history of a Wikipedia page, the code I use to make history flow diagrams like the one below is now in GitHub at https://github.com/rdmpage/wikihistoryflow. There is also a live version at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/wikihistoryflow.

One thing I'm increasingly conscious of is that I've a lot of demos and toy projects hanging around and the code for most of these isn't readily available. So, I plan to clean these up and put them in GitHub so others can explore the code, and reuse it if they see fit. First up is the code to create a HTML+Javascript clone of Nature's iPhone app, as described in an earlier post. There's a live version of the clone here here.

Some time ago, the brilliant GitHub people gave me the following tip. Rajarshi is lazy, and might find it interesting. By appending .patch to the commit URL, a commit can easily be downloaded as patch. That way, developers can easily download it with wget or curl and apply it locally with git am, without having the fetch the full repository.