The past three months (June-August 08) have been extremely busy with conferences, travel and grant applications. Consequently I have been very slack with my recent blogging. In an effort to make recompense, here is a brief update on what I have been up to, and what is coming up. Over the next few days I'll try to expand on a few of these:

• The Virtual Scholar at University College London (27-28 June 08)
I gave a presentation called "The virtual taxonomist" at UCL as part of this meeting. Taxonomists frequently preach to the converted when it comes to publicizing the challanges of taxonomic research. This was an opportunity to talk to a new audience (one that we should be talking to more often) about these problems and how we are trying to digitally address these challenges. I focused on the Scratchpad project but also mentioned the Encyclopedia of Life, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and some data mining tools (Plazi and iPhylo). Amongst the keynote talks was a presentation by Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef) who gave a fantastic talk on an "aliens" view on the differences between scholars as authors and scholar as readers.

• British National Conference on Databases in Cardiff, UK (BNCOD - 10 July 08)
Simon Rycroft gave his first major talk on the Scratchpad project as part of a Biodiversity Informatics workshop at BNCOD in Cardiff. He will be following this up with an international talk at the TDWG meeting in Fremantle, Australia this October, as part of a session entitled "From Small to Big: How to Capitalize on Small Contributions to the Big Dreams of Sharing Biodiversity Information" organized by Gail Kampmeier.

• International Congress of Entomology, Durban, South Africa. (5-11 July 08).
I gave a talk on the Scratchpad project as part of the behemoth that is the International Congress of Entomology. This massive conference is held every 4 years, and this time it was South Africa's turn to host some 4,000(???) deligates at the International Convention Centre in Durban. My talk was part of John La Salle's session on “New technologies and global initiatives in arthropod systematics”. To be honest I thought my talk was a little underwhelming. It was too quick, and lost in the morass of other interesting presentations. Nevertheless, I did manage to host a small discussion at the close of the session looking at some of the infomatics issues that were raised by the talks .

• Science Foo Camp (SciFoo), Googleplex, Mountain View, CA, USA (8-10 August 08)
I was lucking enough to get a reinvite back to SciFoo camp for 2008. This is an unconference is organized by Nature, O'Reilly and Google, and is hosted in building 40 of Googleplex in Mountain View, opposite the more famous building 43 (which includes the offices of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Marissa Mayer). SciFoo 2008 was amazing. Once again I was torn with an impossible choice of which sessions to attend. I twittered those that I did participate in. I also have also posted a few pics of the event on flickr. This year stood out because of the number of biodiversity scientists present - I will blog more on this ASAP.

• eTaxonomy at The International Conference on Monocots, Copenhagen, Denmark (15 August 08)
Bill Baker (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew) invited me to talk at his session on eTaxonomy as part of this conference on Monocots. I focused on the Scratchpads and how different taxonomic communities are using them. Prof Charles Godfray gave the keynote talk of the session, and focused on the issue of whether web taxonomy is the future or a distraction. In recent months several papers have been published suggesting that eTaxonomy is a distraction from the real challanges facing the taxonomic community. In his talk Charles argued the case for eTaxonomy and how it can be used to get more taxonomy done.

• Marie Curie Intra European fellowship application (19 August 08)
With Jan Štefka we submitted a Intra European Marie Curie fellowship for Jan to work with me and recieve training on a project looking at the coevolution and biogeography of Galapagos mockingbirds and their ectoparasites (lice and mites). This work is in conjunction with Lukas Keller and Paquita Hoeck at the Zoological Museum, University of Zurich-Irchel, who have built up a fantastic collection of mockingbird ectoparasites as part of their conservation work.

• Ebbe Nielsen Prize 2008
Since GBIF have just announced this on their website, I guess I can speak publically about this now. After I got back from my travels in Copenhagen and the US, I went through my email backlog (and eventually my spam e-mail box), only to discover that GBIF had been struggling to contact me. Much to my surprise and delight, a message caught by my spam filter said I had won the 2008 award! I will blog about this shortly [Update 27 Aug 08 - see here], but for the moment I want to thank the users and developers of the Scratchpad project. In particular Simon Rycroft and Dave Roberts, without whom I would never have got this project so far.

Up coming events include trips to the University of Illinois (INHS) working with Kevin Johnson, followed by a trip with Simon Rycroft and Lisa Walley to Chicago Field Museum for the Encyclopedia of Life "Drupal Sprint" and New York Botanic Gardens to install a Scratchpad server.