As the worlds first “official” cybertaxonomist a lot of people naturally respond, “cyber what?” when they first hear the term. The real credit for the word goes to Quentin Wheeler, former Keeper of Entomology at the NHM, and now vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.

I have updated my "about me" page on this site, and since some of this arguably belongs in my blog, I thought I'd post a pointer here for those interested.

In mid-January David Eades of Illinois Natural History Survey came to visit the NHM to discuss our use of "Species File" (formally "Orthoptera Species File"), as a Taxonomic Content Management System.

This is the rather hideous name I have coined for systems that facilitate the storage and management of biodiversity informatics data. Ideally these systems should have a web editable interface, and be sufficiently generic that they meet the wide-ranging needs of different research communities working on different taxa.

If you do nothing else today, watch this. It is a bit geeky but the end is worth the wait, and as the movie says, we need to rethink a few things!

A huge leap in the study of parasitic lice was announced today. The first draft of the human body louse genome (Pediculus humanus humanus) was released on VectorBase. This louse is the primary vector of Rickettsia prowazekii which causes Epidemic typhus.

I was in Argentina late 2006 for a conference, and thereafter for a bird watching holiday. As a keen photographer and Mac user I use iPhoto to manage my pictures, and thought I'd have another go with their iPhoto book feature. This provides a set of generic templates within iPhoto from which you can create a picture book that Mac will print and send back as a hardcopy.

The "Encyclopedia of Life" project is an ambitious concept to build an Encyclopedia of species information on the web, rather like WikiSpecies but hopefully with a bit more sophistication. Long before the EoL project was announced, I had been wondering what such an Encyclopedia might look like, and how could it be constructed in a way that scales to the size of the task.

Drupal is fantastic and the implementation of the Bibliography module on this site has convinced me that we (the taxonomic community) should be looking at developing biodiversity informatics tools (i.e., modules) that have much tighter integration with Drupal. I've been browsing the available Drupal modules (5+ compatible) and several stand out, both for use by me and for use within the EDIT program of work (more news on this shortly).