The past month or so has seen a mini-explosion in new blogs of interest to our readers. I've added half a dozen or so to the wiki list. Feel free to edit or add new ones if you have wiki access, or submit suggestions either via submit weblink or as a comment here.
I know I've forgotten one or two, please don't be offended!
Here it is, complete with PDF (760 KB). Tired now. Enjoy.
In a heroic effort (and cleverly achieved through RSS), Andrew has compiled a table of webservers for bioinformatics from this year's NAR webserver edition.
You can find it on this wiki page. If you try one of these servers, help the community by leaving a brief comment about your user experience. Was it accessible? Easy to use? Did it do what you wanted or expected? That kind of thing.
It's almost time for the monthly compendium of bioinformatics-oriented material from the blogosphere that we call Bio::Blogs. I'll be hosting this month so send your submissions to the usual bioblogs <at> gmail <dot> com. Remember, you can send one of your own posts or recommend someone else's.
The official publishing date is August 1st (Wednesday), but I may delay until Friday 3rd, depending on other commitments this week.
Updated: Friday 3rd it is, so there's still time to get those submissions in!
I wish nodalpoint would aggregate posts from its members
Wishes can come true. If you're (a) a registered Nodalpoint user, (b) have a blog with content related to Nodalpoint and (c) would like to syndicate your posts on Nodalpoint, read on for more information. To jump straight to the content, look for the "News aggregator" link in the right-hand sidebar.
What's the best way to discuss "open research"? Let's say that you have a research problem. You might post it on your blog and receive comments. Or you might create a wiki with questions, to which people can contribute answers. All well and good, but then we end up with useful content spread all over the web. What's the solution? Centralised portals, aggregators? Or are people happy to search multiple sources for content?
I don't know the answers. However, in the spirit of Mike's open science article on our wiki, I created an open research section. The idea is that if someone performing open research has a question and you have an answer, you can post it here and point them to it. I've kicked things off with a look at a recent bioinformatics problem from Rosie's blog.
I'm not proposing that this be the central point for these kinds of discussions - it's just another alternative and one that we can all find.
Publish or Perish is an interesting (and free) piece of software, that obtains citations using Google Scholar and then analyses them in various ways. In particular it makes use of h-indices, which have been proposed as a "fairer" citation metric.
I've been in correspondence with the developers over the past couple of months and they kindly let me know that a native Linux version, built using GTK+ 2.x is now available. If citation analysis is your thing, give it a try and let the authors know what you think.
I've just got around to trying out Slideshare and I noticed a small collection of presentations under the bioinformatics tag - including several from the "usual suspects".
A suggestion: how about when Nodalpoint users upload to Slideshare, they include "nodalpoint" as a tag? That way we get to learn more about what everyone is working on. If you have pre-made presentations that you're willing to share, it's a quick and easy way for us all to get an idea of the collective expertise here.
It's been 3 years since I made it to a meeting - that was ISMB 2003, here in Brisbane. Next week I'll be attending ComBio2006...here in Brisbane. Ah well.
The "com" in ComBio is "combined" rather than "computational" - it's a large conference for a number of Australian/New Zealand life science societies. There are 10 streams including several of interest to Nodalpointers, especially bioinformatics/systems biology, gene expression/regulation and protein structure/function. I'll do my best to blog any interesting stuff here and at my place, possibly "live" depending on the facilities.
update: the blogging is at my place and it ain't live thanks to the (non) facilities.
Just a polite reminder that Nodalpoint is not a forum for advertising commercial software. Such posts/comments will not appear at the front page and will most likely be deleted at the discretion of the admins. We're all about open source here.
You know who you are.
