This site is undergoing a much needed spring clean. I’m also linking in an a few new features from various Web apps I have been using over the past few months. Here is a list of the changes:

• LibraryThing: This does for books what Connotea does for scientific papers, or last.fm does for music. It allows me to build a catalog of the books I read, tagging and rating them as I go. I considered Shelfari for this job, but in the end LibraryThing (part owned by AbeBooks) won hands down. Who ever did the HCI for LibraryThing did a fantastic job. Why can’t we build interfaces that are this simple for biological data? You’ll find widgets on this site covering my complete library (at least those books I can get at right now), my last three books, and a tag cloud for my library.

• Twitter: I never really grokked Twitter, until I was sitting in meeting listening to one of our public offer people talk about the public-science interaction in our new Darwin Center building. For the uninitiated, public offer is museum speak for the stuff developed and put on display to the public. One of the “offerings” will in effect be a microblog by researchers using the new molecular and image laboratories. These labs are (in part) on display to the public, so the idea is that folk will get some textual context to the daily activities in the labs. This seems a perfect use for Twitter, and from this point on I was hooked. You can access the last 20 microblog entires from this site, or see my complete list direct from Twitter.

• Biography: I’ve added a shorter biographic blurb about what I do, that links to my blogs, reading list and papers/presentations. The long version was too long and was getting out of date, though it is shorter biographic blurb.

• Publications and presentations: My list of publications and presentations is now very out of date. I have been slow to update the list, because I effectively have to rebuild the entire table every time I add something new. In future I’ll use a dedicated content type on the site, which means each new entry will appear as a dedicated node. Hopefully this means I’ll update these lists more often, although it will take me a bit of time to get my back catalogue up to date.

• Wish list: I would like to keep better track of where I am and the places I visit. If anyone knows of a suitable Web App. that allows me to geolocate the places I visit and display this as a Widget, let me know.