The Year of Blogging Dangerously

The Year of Blogging Dangerously Lessons from the “Blogosphere” Dr. Duncan Hull “dullhunk” PostDoctoral Research Associate School of Chemistry, mib.ac.uk 23rd April 2009 Manchester e-Scholar Institutional Repository

Dangerous summary
I’ve Spent the last ~ year building an institutional repository
Using free and cheap web-based “blogging” software tools:
flickr.com , myexperiment .org , citeulike .org , friendfeed .com , slideshare.net and wordpress .com part of the “Blogosphere”
There are some valuable lessons to be learnt from these tools:
Pros: Things they do well
Cons: Things they do badly
The dangerous currents I’ve witnessed while bathing in the blogosphere
Let me demonstrate…
Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/roger/50572796/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-en-big.png An Institutional Repository is for Saving and Sharing the Digital Intellectual Property of a Research Institution online http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_repository

The Institution: “ The University of Me and My Mates ”

Me My Data & Intellectual Property (I.P.) 1. Papers I’m reading and writing 2. Laboratory Notebook 3. Slideshows 4. Software (workflows) 5. Images (photos, figures and illustrations) Notebook picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigpogm/143995198/

Two things I need to do with my data
1. SAVE all of it
NOT on a local hard-drive (unreliable)
remote location via the Internet
Sharing picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/clappstar/178050837/ Mmmm…Sharing is Good!
2. SHARE some of it on the World Wide Web
With my social network
& anyone else who is interested
BUT Only when I’m ready to
e.g. don’t share everything immediately

1. Papers I’m reading or have written Defrosting the Digital Library Hull, Pettifer and Kell PLoS Computational Biology http://pubmed.gov/18974831 citeulike.org/user/dullhunk Save and share personal digital library, organise all pdf files and metadata in one place on the Web

2. Lab Notebook , notes, journal club, scribbles, opinion etc
blogging software powers
http://duncan.hull.name that’s me “ Bioinformatics Blogger ”
http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk Doug Kell, the “ BBSRC Blogger ”
http://salampax.wordpress.com the “ Baghdad Blogger ”
Publish notes, people can comment: See wordpress .com and wordpress.org for details http://tinyurl.com/bigboffins 1,475 views as of 2009 Blogging is powerful but can be dangerous!

Why is blogging dangerous?
Putting Intellectual Property on the Web, mostly with Creative Commons “Attribution” license
Anyone is free to copy, distribute, transmit, remix and adapt the work…
Must attribute work to original author
BUT Plagiarism without attribution? “Scooping”? Sacrificing originality? Losing I.P.?
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
FREE SPEECH: You can say whatever you like on a blog!!!
Very powerful and liberating
But no “safety net” of peer review before publication
Make friends and influence people but also…
Lose friends and alienate people
FUNDING “The F-word”
Not on the funding bodies radar of acceptable research outcomes

Dangerous risks mostly compensated for by benefits Dr. Cameron Neylon, Biochemist Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and The University of Southampton I started up a blog and all I got was five invites to give keynotes, ten new collaborators, introduction to new funding bodies, an interview in Nature , an invite to Science Foo Camp , three papers...and a couple of T-shirts Cameron’s Blog: “Science in the Open” http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/ With thanks to John Dupuis “Confessions of a Science Librarian” http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2009/03/academic-blogging-promoting-your.html

3. Slideshows @ slideshare .net/dullhunk 15,732 views! Professor Carole Goble test Save and share powerpoint presentations for viewing in web browser

Speaking of shows…
Another talented British woman of similar age to Carole …
Now seen more than 37 million times (according to youtube .com viewing statistics)
The Web is very powerful way of saving and sharing data (e.g. Talent shows / Slide shows)
People love statistics! So let them eat stats…
Susan Boyle Image from The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/18/susan-boyle-britains-got-talent
15,000+ views is very impressive …

4. Software recipes
Share workflows for analysing data from distributed databases
See myexperiment .org

5. Images See www.flickr.com - Photos - Figures - Illustrations Store and share images on the web

The University of Me: Essential Features
Feeds, anyone (or anything) can subscribe, automatic notification of updates
(technology: ATOM / RSS)
Updated daily (never “finished”) 24/7 always-on
Allows comments
Everything important has its own URL (or URI)
Integral part of the Web, can be linked to…
Indexed by Google etc
Cartoon from http://xkcd.com/386/ Personal: “me-Science” and “Selfish Scientist”

“ The University of Me and My Mates ” “ My Mates” = Trusted friends + colleagues, mostly PostDocs and PhD students, Globally distributed, young “Google Generation” but includes some more senior scientists

friendfeed.com/dullhunk Integrates all data from citeulike, wordpress, flickr, myexperiment and slideshare via feeds into one place … and all my peers too Voting and commentary Can be noisy but interesting data usually floats to the top Trusted Social Network of ~30 peers See “Microblogging the ISMB” Saunders et al PLoS Computational Biology http://pubmed.gov/19180175

Things the tools do well: Thumbs up
Easy (and often fun) to use, very lightweight
Special tools to make it easy to upload data (widgets, clients, plugins, browser buttons etc)
Viewing statistics: “this thing has been viewed x times”
Each site does one thing (and one thing only) very well
Flickr for photos (and video)
Citeulike for scientific papers
Wordpress for blogging etc
Friendfeed (social feed integration)
Destination and a service
Allows embedding and re-use of data elsewhere
Borat Very Nice, Me Likes!

But there is a problem: Thumbs down
These tools are great but…
Simon Cowell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-en-big.png Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping and see also http://tinyurl.com/cropshare

Web Server Space is just like agricultural land…
I’m a sharecropper on the plantation
I’m a sharecropper on the plantation
I’m a sharecropper on the slideshare,
myexperiment and friendfeed plantations
Each Web Server is run by a “landlord” who can
Change their terms without notice (e.g. stop being “free”)
Increase rent (e.g. stop being cheap)
Decrease the quality of service they provide
Become bankrupt and lose all my data
or be bought up by bigger companies
This could leave my valuable data stranded!
Long term storage is compromised, this could be dangerous
I do not own the “land” or “plantation” that I “farm” data on

Enter Institutional Repository
This is where Manchester e-Scholar and other Institutional Repositories can help
Solve the “sharecropper” problem?
Solve the longevity problem?

Conclusions
Institutional Repositories should copy other web-based and blogging tools
Easy to use and sociable
Easy to upload all kinds of data, have some privacy options
Focus on archiving specific types of data really well (rather than archiving everything badly)
Give every important thing a URL (and DOI’s would be great too)
Feeds (ATOM and /or RSS)
Viewing Statistics
But give us longevity, make it last
Be both a destination AND a service
There are already lots of really good tools for saving and sharing data
Institutional Repositories compete directly with these

Acknowledgements
Phil Butler for the invitation to speak today, and Jan Wilkinson JRULM
Refine Project www. nactem .ac. uk/refine
Sophia Ananiadou and Douglas Kell
Jun'ichi Tsujii, Pedro Mendes, Steve Pettifer, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka BBSRC grant code BB/E004431/1
www. myGrid .org. uk and www.myExperiment.org especially Carole Goble and Robert Stevens
Peter Weir, Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson etc for title of this talk adapted from “The Year of Living Dangerously” film
Any Questions?

The Year of Blogging Dangerously

by Duncan Hull on Apr 24, 2009

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The Year of Blogging Dangerously — Presentation Transcript