Yesterday I discovered (via a tweet by Owen Stephens) a very interesting document Personal names around the world that discusses the following question: How do people’s names differ around the world, and what are the implications of those differences on the design of forms, databases, ontologies, etc. for the Web?

In July Wiley published the book Visualize This – The Flowing Data Guide to Design, Visualization and Statistics. The book is written by Nathan Yau, and he is of course also behind the popular FlowingData blog about the same topic. This is a short review of the book. Please keep in mind that I’m no expert in data visualization. The book is written for people like me, an expert in the topic will probably look at the book differently.

Version 1.0 of the reference manager Mendeley was released today. In good Web 2.0 tradition it took three years from the first Beta release to the first “finished” product. I interviewed co-founder Victor Henning back in September 2008, and both the software and the company have gone a long way since then. Congratulations. Mendeley has changed reference management in many ways.

Last week Google Scholar announced a new feature on the Google Scholar Blog: Google Scholar Citations. The stated purpose of this tool is to allow researchers to calculate their citation metrics, e.g. their Hirsch index (H-index). This is an interesting new service, that not only helps with calculating citation metrics, but also shows you who is citing your papers – a great discovery tool.

Other blog posts often provide important background material for your own posts, and they are typically cited by inline links in the text. But sometimes we need more formal citations, e.g. when citing blog posts in a journal article or when providing a bibliography. But how do you properly cite a blog post?

Brendan Thomas has published an interesting paper that looks at author email addresses in the PubMed database of biomedical literature. Email addresses of first authors have been added to PubMed since 1996, and they can be retrieved via the standard web interface or automated software. This makes PubMed an excellent place to find the email address of an academic author, but also shows that PubMed is very vulnerable to email address harvesting.

Blogging is a great format to report from conferences. The regular blog format works best for posts written at the end of the day – unless you are typing really fast. Microblogging, i.e. a number of short or very short posts by a group of people, works better for live blogging of an event and has become very popular.

Last week the first Alpha version of Annotum was released. Annotum is “a scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress”. I first learned about Annotum at the Beyond the PDF workshop in January. One of the themes of the workshop was that we need better tools for authoring, reviewing and publishing of scholarly articles.

Three leading funding organizations today made this important announcement: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research.

At the beginning of the month Google, Bing and Yahoo announced schema.org, a new initiative for structured markup on the web. Richard MacManus responded with a critical piece at ReadWriteWeb (Is Schema.org really a Google Land Grab?), mainly criticizing that the initiative didn’t use RDFa and didn’t seem to have consulted with the web standards body W3C.

The Science Online London 2011 Conference takes place September 2-3 at the British Library. I am again one of the organizers (together with Lou Woodley from Nature.com and Kaitlin Thaney from Digital Science), and I’m getting both excited and nervous the closer we get to September. We have recently posted a first draft of the conference program, and you can see that we are trying something new.