The Year of Blogging DangerouslyLessons 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 currentsI’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 LibraryHull, Pettifer and Kell PLoS Computational Biologyhttp://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:Seewordpress.comand wordpress.orgfor details

http://tinyurl.com/bigboffins

1,475 views as of 2009

Blogging is powerful but can bedangerous!

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, BiochemistRutherford 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!

ProfessorCarole 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)

1. The Web is very powerful way of saving and sharing data(e.g. Talent shows / Slide shows)

2. 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. Softwarerecipes

• 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 slidesharevia 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 Networkof ~30 peers

See“Microblogging the ISMB”Saunders et alPLoS Computational Biologyhttp://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 TsuruokaBBSRC grant code BB/E004431/1

• www.myGrid.org.uk andwww.myExperiment.org especiallyCarole Goble and Robert Stevens

• Peter Weir, Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson etc fortitle of this talk adapted from “The Year of Living Dangerously” film

• Any Questions?