nodalpoint.org

The Ensembl Weblog provides news, views and announcements about the Ensembl Genome Browser. The blog has been going for a few years now, but I’ve only just become aware of it thanks to a recent Ensembl Genome Browser Tutorial by Bert Overduin. Catching up on posts from Ensemblians this year, Ewan Birney wrote a piece about The Gene Love-in last week and Paul Flicek briefly described the 1000 Genomes project back in January. The Ensembl Weblog is fairly low traffic, so if you don’t already read it, it’s worth considering subscribing to the feed.

And it’s good to see more scientists using blogs to communicate. Long may this trend continue!

A crude score for benchmarking scientists

Have you ever wanted to compare different scientists by their publication record? It's not always an easy task, but here is a crude and handy way to benchmark people by their journal publications in Nature, Science or PNAS using PubMed. Let's call it the NSPNAS score, it's not the h-index and it's far from perfect, but it can be useful.

UK news-rag The Grauniad has a series of interviews with some of the people behind the next generation web, so-called Web 2.0. After reading these interviews, I can't help wondering, who are the equivalent pioneers in bioinformatics?