As I have mentioned elsewhere, I spent that last 2 weeks in the US, catching up with various friends and colleagues I am collaborating with in Woods Hole and San Diego. My trip culminated in SciFoo ’07, at Googleplex in Mountain View, California – a 3-day science fest organized by Nature and O'Reilly, and hosted by Google. The “unconference” comprised of 200+ invited scientists, techno-geeks, entrepreneurs, artists and writers who are using science and technology to change the world. SciFoo has no predefined agenda; instead attendees collaboratively create one during the first evening of the event. There are numerous accounts of what happened at SciFoo ’07 (just Google SciFoo, or check out the blog posts on Technorati and the pictures on Flickr). Here are a few personal highlights:

Last week I ran a session at SciFoo Camp entitled “Biodiversity on the web”. I had originally planned to talk about some web-based environments (Scratchpads) we have created at the NHM to help biologists get their taxonomic research online, and the implications of this for science publishing. However, I bottled on my original talk (Science publishing for the MySpace generation: MySpecies and the Encyclopedia of Life), which was too long and obscure for most of the people that showed up.

I have been struggling to keep up with the number and purpose of the new Scratchpads that have been going up. To help me keep track, Simon Rycroft has written a little script that dynamically pulls the list from the Edit Web Revisions server. We will try to embed a bit more information (like each site's missions statement) in due course. In the unlikely event that you want to keep track of these sites on your own web page, just paste the following into a webpage:

The Research Information Network (RIN) was set up in 2005 to lead and co-ordinate the provision of research information in the UK. It is a lean organization with just 4 staff members, and is funded by a consortium of UK sponsors that include the UK Higher Education bodies, National Libraries, and Research Councils.

Integrating Google Maps into the template Drupal installations we have been developing at the NHM (branded “Scratchpads”) is amazingly easy thanks to the Drupal's GMap module. Once installed this puts a Google Map Macro creator on every site.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, with some colleagues at the NHM I have been developing a template installation of the Drupal CMS (branded "Scratchpads") that help biological taxonomists get the products of their work on the web.

As an avid aquarist that used to work in the ornamental fish trade, I am always keen to hear about new technologies being used solve fishy problems. One of the oldest is the challenge of helping the public identify species in large display aquaria.