Friday 28 November 2008

Saturday 22 November 2008

PLoS ONE adds social bookmarking


A few months ago, McDawg established contact with Topaz



"Topaz is a tax-exempt, 501(c)3, nonprofit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. Topaz is governed by a Board of Directors chaired by PLoS co-founder Michael B. Eisen.

Topaz received a its start-up grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and support from PLoS, Open Source Application Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center, Creative Commons, Science Commons, Fedora Commons, Mulgara, and many other foundations, universities, organizations and individuals".


Amongst other entities, several (5 out of 7 at the last count) PLoS Journals run on the Topaz platform so McDawg was interested to engage in some dialogue.

McDawg's feedback was appreciated and when asked for suggestions, adding social bookmarking to PLoS Manuscripts was my gut reaction.

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Just there, whilst browsing PLoS ONE for content of interest, I was reading Adherent Monomer-Misfolded SOD1 when I noted something I hadn't seen before on a PLoS Manuscript:-

Bookmark this page:
StumbleUpon Facebook Connotea CiteULike Digg


Blimey. One wonders how that happened ;-)

Semantic web? You betcha. Thank you Topaz !!!

Mission and Goals


"Topaz is a nonprofit organization of focused on developing open source software around collaborative creation, management and sharing of information.

Our goals are to:

* Develop software framework to allow easy and rapid development of data driven applications
* Facilitate research and collaboration of data/content models in various knowledge fields
* Enable users to develop innovative ways to explore, use and share data"


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The keeper though, "As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers".

Thursday 20 November 2008

BBC FREE?

As a follow on from this related McBlawg post, a number of media outlets/bloggers have reported on the latest development in this area over the last 24 hours.

Essentially, over the next year, the BBC will start to live-cast BBC1 and BBC2 via the web in the next step of their experimentation with releasing content other than on TV.

Here is the release from the BBC, Main BBC channels go live on net

"The live simulcast for both channels will be available from 27 November".


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Some interesting and differing views about this already in the blogosphere, such as Got a Computer? You’ll Need To Buy a £139.50 Licence, BBC to transmit live, simulcast style, via iPlayer and BBC channels to start live streaming

Sure will be interesting to see how this pans out. I wonder what Glyn Moody makes of this? He responded here.

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++UPDATE++

And here are the links to BBC ONE and BBC TWO live streaming.

blurb

Monday 17 November 2008

Tagged by a five things meme

I think this is the first time McDawg has been tagged by any such meme.

This one via Abel Pharmboy so here goes:-


5 Things I was Doing 10 years Ago:
(1) Rehearsing with my rock band twice a week
(2) Regularly recording new material
(3) Rock 'n Roll
(4) Err, what was the question, man?
(5) Namely (1) and (2)


5 Things On My To-Do List Today:
(1) Finish work (currently on lunch)
(2) daily surf round fav sites
(3) what digital camera should I buy?
(4) Dinner & couple of beers
(5) TV/web

5 Snacks I Love:
(1) McCoy’s crisps (aka "potato chips")
(2) extra strong mints
(3) Diet Irn-Bru
(4) Coca Cola
(5) content of office sweetie tin - nom nom nom


5 Things I Would Do If I Were A Millionaire

(1) spend at least two months a year on this “little” vessel (can’t reveal why this one though), or something similar
(2) find a really interesting job such as (3)
(3) offer to spend some spare time working for the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation
(4) Invest money in Scotland, most probably, my fav family run malt whisky distillery on the Isle of Islay
(5) Purchase (and hang out at) a couple of new state of the art recording studious in various countries

5 Places I’ve Lived:
(1) With parents, house 1
(2) With parents, house 2
(3) current apartment - self
(4) various camp sites, UK/France (well, vacation)
(5) various youth hostels, UK (well, vacation)

5 Jobs I’ve Had:
(1) Postman
(2) Shop Assistant - Newsagent
(3) Shop Assistant – Record Shop
(4) Motor/Personal Injury Claims Handler
(5) Property Loss Adjuster



McDawg now tags Matt Brown, Anna Kushnir, Henry Gee, Martin “Martinmeme” Fenner and Jean-Claude Bradley

Friday 14 November 2008

Thursday 13 November 2008

John Wilbanks - Science Commons

“We have to take the things that we actually know and put them together into a usable format, so that anyone who is interested and intelligent enough to form a good question can become a scientist. That’s what we have to do.” John Wilbanks 2008.


Seedmagazine.com Revolutionary Minds

It's no secret that McDawg is a strong supporter of Science Commons (SC). This short talk from the VP (John Wilbanks) of SC and Creative Commons (CC) very much resonated here and I hope you enjoy it too.

"The Internet, according to John Wilbanks, has democratized creative culture. Science lags far behind. "The vast majority of science is actually a secret," Wilbanks says. "It's hidden in labs until it gets published, or it's thrown in the autoclave if it's not thought to be worth publishing, or it sits in a fridge because no one knows how to make it available. The fragments never come back together because too many different people have to give permission, and no one can put all the pieces together to ask interesting questions." Wilbanks heads the four-year-old nonprofit Science Commons, an offshoot of Creative Commons. Like its parent, Science Commons is dedicated to creating an open web culture in which users — in this case scientists — can easily share their work".

More under the fold

Selected from Revolutionary Minds c/o Seed Media Group

H/T to, Open Access News