Publishing your science paper is only the half the job | David Dobbs | Science. Not all papers achieve museum space like Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images Perhaps the oddest and least predictable scientific conference I attend is ScienceOnline, a version of which met earlier this month at the British Library. That event, ScienceOnline London, or SOLO, is a spinoff of the original ScienceOnline held every January in the United States. Both started as science blogger gatherings and morphed into meetups of anyone interested in doing or communicating about science online – scientists, teachers, writers, network and data and design geeks, entrepreneurs.
I go because I never know whom I'll meet – or what, on or off the official programme, will emerge as the hot issues. One idea that took a higher profile than I had expected this year was that the scientific establishment has come to wildly overvalue and overemphasise the scientific paper. Ditching or devaluing the paper poses challenges, of course. My Science Online London 2010 impressions - Trading knowledge Blog | Nature Publishing Group. Classification is something that librarians are supposed to be good at, but when it comes to classifying types of libraries there is a bit of a #FAIL. At library school I was taught that there are three main kinds of libraries: public libraries, academic libraries and ‘special’ libraries.
Public libraries are well-understood, usually considered as the prime exemplar of what libraries are. Academic libraries too are broadly familiar. I think of them mainly as libraries in universities and higher education institutions, but the term can also encompass further education libraries and perhaps school libraries too at a stretch. But who knows what ‘special libraries’ are? It is a cop-out – a class of libraries that aren’t in one of the other classes. Miscellaneous, ‘other’, odds-and-sods. Non-aligned My career has been spent in this kind of library – I think of them as the non-aligned movement of libraries, defined by what they are not as much as by what they are. Library Camp Workplaces. Fuzzier Logic » Blog Archive » Science Online London 2010. The Great Science Online London Tweetup. The 3rd Annual Science Online London Conference took place last Friday and Saturday. For me it was again a fantastic event. Matt Brown is collecting all blog posts, pictures, videos, etc. over at this Nature Network post.
As one of the organizers of the conference (mainly helping with the program) I was pretty nervous, and I have to admit that I didn’t sleep well Thursday and Friday. And much better Saturday. Flickr photo by Mendeley.com with me on far left. One important reason to go to a conference is of course to meet the members of your community in real life. Of the many impressions of the conference I want to focus on one: Twitter. Twitter has of course become a mainstream tool to follow conferences. Flickr image by Simon Cockell. Simon Cockell has created a Wordle with the conference tweets, which gives a good idea of the topics discussed.
That same panel discussion also made the best use of Twitter as integral part of a session. Flickr photo by Mendeley.com. Death by Powerpoint, Internet Science Nerds, and #Solo10. My, how you've grown. Reflections on #solo10. Last week I was at the Science Online London conference, the annual shindig where internet science nerds gather in the meatspace. This is my third Solo conference, my second manifested as flesh. And it was good - as last year, this is easily going to be the most important conference I'll attend this year, both intellectually and in terms of taking care of business. My session on the Friday was well attended and seemed to be well received. As usual, more time was devoted to blogging than anything else, and apart from too much emphasis on blog networks, inevitable so soon after PepsiGate, it did give me time to think about why people blog. It turns out that there's a simple answer - there are as many reasons for blogging as there are bloggers.
The other useful insight was the theme that emerged from the Mendeley Fringe Unconference on Friday night and from Evan Harris' keynote on Saturday: don't overestimate impact of new media. So, all sunshine and light then? Where should Solo go now? Stuff we linked to on Twitter last week | Highly Allochthonous. Quick Links. Stages Of Succession: Wild Haired Scientists Online. Engaging people online – Science Online 2010 | Not Exactly Rocket Science. Science Online: Bloggers, Commenters and the Reputation Game. I dropped into one of the unconference sessions, looking at engaging with your readers (of obvious interest to me). The panel did a sterling job of giving a beginner's guide to managing comments and commenters, from different scales (personal blogs to Ars Technica). I thought Ed Yong's comments about building a commenter community around your personal blog were particularly good - and the delurking thread idea is one I intend to nick.
But the audience, once the questions started, took the conversation in an entirely different direction, about the reputation of scientists and (to a degree) to the on-going problem of poor scientific reporting. Now, as a journalist, a profession usually in the top three least trusted professions, I'm not entirely clear why scientists are so concerned, but there's clearly a strong feeling fo disconnect between the scientific community and the general public. There was some attempt in the conversation to shape blogs into the answer to that.