The common feature of these communication tools is that you write online.
Wiki
A wiki is a website or similar
online resource which allows users to add and edit content collectively.
A wiki lets you put articles and allows others (in restricted manner) to participate
in the writing process and bring in their knowledge to the subject.
Content is interlinked. Content can be made only accessible to specific groups
or single users.
Two prominent wikis are Wikipedia (the
software is Mediawiki),
the popular online encyclopedia, and MIT
openwetware. A comprehensive list of wiki software is here.
Wikis on the internet are visible to all.
Online text editors
For collaborative editing and writing of a specific document by a defined team
there are internet based text editors available.
One registers as user and after login you can nominate other editors for your
document. You can allow multiple users to work on a document (simultaneously).
The document can also be downloaded onto ones harddisk.
Some online editors for cooperative writing are:
Google Docs & Spreadsheets (only
for Mozilla Firefox, SeaMonkey and Camino)
Zohowriter (IE,
Netscape, Mozilla)
Ajaxwrite (Mozilla
Firefox)
Blogs
Weblogs/Blogs were originally generated as personal online dairies or opinions
to specific themes.
Contributions to blogs are allowed in form of comments. Free for all commenting
is something bloggers
have embraced and has led to their explosion in popularity.
Another basic feature of a blog is pinging. Pinging is a mechanism whereby
other blog search engines
are alerted automatically to a new post being made by your blog users. An example
is Technocrati
(Real-time search for user-generated media, including blogs, by tag or keyword).
The trackback mechanism is more complex: you read a post, and you
comment about it on your blog.
You place the URL to their post in your blog and their blog picks up your
post and leaves it as a comment in their post. Confusing, isn't it?
RSS feeds are a common feature of websites (not only blogs) and
push your posts onto other RSS readers. In case websites read your RSS,
your post appears on someone elses website, where it might get even more
readership.
There are many places on the web where you can create a blog, some are free,
some are paid services. To name a few: Blogger
(by Google), LiveJournal
and Wordpress, Typepad, Movable
Type.
Blogger is the by far host of the jost blogs. This is probably because it
is very easy to set up and free. A quick look at Alexa rankings
(rough estimate of traffic) shows over 2 bio.pageviews per day (!).
Interesting blogs are:
Scienceblog
Nodalpoint is a bioinformatics
blog
Journal blogs:
There are also Blogs associated with journals. They may help
bridge the gap between literature and different ways to public controversies.
Often print journals cannot keep up with current developments in certain
fields. Two expamles are:
BioethicsNet
The Molecular Systems
Biology Blog The Seven Stones is a vital interactive
platform for hot topics in the field of Systems Biology.
Blog carnivals
A Carnival is a periodic presentation of excellent blog writing, selected and
submitted by the authors themselves. It offers a collection of links to
posts
from across the blogosphere that share a common theme.
Blog carnivals attempt to provide a weekly or monthly summary of key postings
in a particular blogging community or on a special topic
The source media is different (blogs, mailing lists) but the editorial process
and end results are essentially the same: a regular digest
of important scholarly or technical discussions.
The first carnival, Carnival of the Vanities, sought to showcase posts that
bloggers felt were their very best.
Subsequent carnivals have developed in
the same spirit, but are usually focused on a particular theme.
A comprehensive list of current carnivals can be found at Blog
Carnival.
Two that I liked a lot are the Tangled
Bank, a carnival for science, medicine,
and natural history bloggers and the Cancer
Research Blog Carnival.
Why are biologists still resistant to blogging?
Young scientists may fear that blogging has a poor image and could damage
their careers.
They might fear that superiors consider it as waste of time, or even dangerous.
Until blogging is seen as normal this will continue to be a problem.
Often it is way too dangerous to discuss work in progress with outside people.
But more scientists believe that excessive competition can harm science,
they see the benefit of brainstorming their research ideas on a blog far
outweighting
the risks. Not to mention the advantage of getting quick support in technical
and practical questions.
Once scientists come up with some sort of peer-review mechanism for blogs
for their credibility, without diminishing their spontaneity, blogs will
take off.
Maybe this idea will be taken further by journals which already practice
open access policy.
Where can you store the links to all the information you find on the web?
The website del.icio.us
is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web
bookmarks.
After successful login, you start by putting two buttons onto your web browser:
One that can store the site you are looking at in delicious and another button
to check your bookmarks on delicious. Bookmarks can be shared or not and are
labelled with tags that you define. Many people use the del.icio.us linkrolls,
tagrolls and network badges to display
their links and information on their blogs an websites.
Similar services are offered by Stumbleupon, Netvouz, Mister
Wong, YahooMyWeb, furl, Connotea.
Technocrati
is a Real-time search for user-generated media (including weblogs) by tag or
keyword. Also provides popularity indexes.
Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with
Google, Yahoo and IceRocket.
As of April 2008, Technorati indexes over 100 million weblogs.
Digg
"is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.
From the biggest online destinations to the jost
obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. News stories
and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page
through a user-based
ranking system. All content and access to the site is free, but registration
is compulsory for certain elements, such as promoting (digging)
stories, submitting
stories and commenting on stories."
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