I had the great pleasure and privilege of announcing the launch of the Panton Principles at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest on Saturday. The launch of the Panton Principles, many months after they were first suggested is really largely down to the work of Jonathan Gray.

Image via CrunchBase I have been saying for quite some time that I think Friendfeed offers a unique combination of functionality that seems to work well for scientists, researchers, and the people they want to (or should want to) have conversations with. For me the core of this functionality lies in two places: first that the system explicitly supports conversations that centre around objects.

Image by dullhunk via Flickr One of the great things about being invited to speak that people don’t often emphasise is that it gives you space and time to hear other people speak.

Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr It hasn’t been a real good week for peer review.

 Image via Wikipedia Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good practice, or writing decent code.

Towards the end of last year I wrote up some initial reactions to the announcement of Nature Communications and the communications team at NPG were kind enough to do a Q&A to look at some of the issues and concerns I raised. Specifically I was concerned about two things.

Apologies for any wierdness in your feed readers. The following is the reason why as I try to get things working properly again. The past two years on this blog I wrote made some New Year’s resolutions and last year I assessed my performance against the previous year’s aims.

Image by thelastminute via Flickr A talk given at the Edinburgh University IT Futures meeting late in 2009. The talk discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Wave as a tool for research and provides some pointers on how to think about using it in an academic setting. The talk was recorded in a Wave with members of the audience taking notes around images of the slides which I had previously uploaded.

Nat Torkington, picking up on my post over the weekend about the CRU emails takes a slant which has helped me figure out how to write this post which I was struggling with. He says: As I responded over at Radar, yes I am absolutely calling for social software for scientists, but I didn’t mean to say that we could expect it to help us find the visionaries amongst the simply wrong. But this raises a very helpful question.

I’ve avoided writing about the Climate Research Unit emails leak for a number of reasons. Firstly it is clearly a sensitive issue with personal ramifications for some and for many others just a very highly charged issue. Probably more importantly I simply haven’t had the time or energy to look into the documents myself. I haven’t, as it were, examined the raw data for myself, only other people’s interpretations.

Computer Science Department, University of Newcastle, October 15 2009 Capturing Process: Challenges and opportunities View more documents from Cameron Neylon.