All over the Britain, politicians are getting ready to publish their expenses on the Interweb. Why? Because they are trying to regain their lost credibility, after making some incredibly dodgy and embarrassing expense claims [1-7]. Scandals aside, this is all well and good since this money has come from the UK taxpayers pocket, and politicians are public servants, doing public work which is supposedly in the public good.

Network Tools and Applications in Biology (NETTAB) is a series of workshops in Bioinformatics. It focuses on the most promising and innovative ICT tools and their utility in Bioinformatics. These workshops aim to introduce participants to the evolving network standards and technologies that are being applied to the field of biology. Since 2001, the NETTAB workshops have being doing a Giro d’Italia or  Grand Tour of Italy;

For anyone who missed the original bioinformatics seminar I’ll be doing a repeat of the “ Defrosting the Digital Library ” talk, this time for the staff in the John Rylands University Library (JRUL) . This is the main academic library in Manchester with (quote) “more than 4 million printed books and manuscripts, over 41,000 electronic journals and 500,000 electronic books, as well as several hundred databases, the John Rylands University

OK, look I know that by posting the latest viral marketing video from Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. I’m just a pawn (or vector) in their advertising game. This particular video has been around for a couple of months now but it is probably poor internet hygiene to spread these pandemic viral videos.

After a brief absence, it is good to see the XML Summer School is back again this September (20th-25th) at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. This is  “a unique event for everyone using, designing or implementing solutions using XML and related technologies.” I’ve been both a delegate and a speaker here over the years; back in 2005, with Nick Drummond we presented the Protégé and OWL tutorial which was good fun.

Michel Dumontier is visiting Manchester this week, he will be doing a seminar on Monday 11th of May,

The 18th International World Wide Web Conference, www2009 finished last week in Madrid. In times of global economic, pandemic and ecologic crisis, the value of attending international conferences is questionable, so for armchair delegates like me, here are some www papers and www links that are www worth a look.

Via the Official Google Research Blog at the University of Google, Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig and Fernando Pereira have published an interesting expert opinion piece in the  March/April 2009 edition of IEEE Intelligent Systems: computer.org/intelligent.

Details of an upcoming gig, The Scholarly Communication Landscape in Manchester on the 23rd of April 2009. If you are interested in coming, you need to register by Monday the 13th April at the official symposium pages.

My first proper full-time job was working in the big bad world of scientific publishing for a family run company based in Oxford called Blackwell Science Limited, or blacksci.co.uk which is now part of wiley.com. Consequently, I’ve a few friends and former colleagues who still work in various parts of the publishing industry.

In my inbox this morning, an intriguing email from Timo Hannay, Tim O’Reilly and Chris DiBona: Obviously I’m thrilled to bits to receive such an email, I’ve been to scifoo once before and it was a fantastic mind-blowing experience. This time, I’m invited as a consolation prize for being a runner-up in the international science blogging challenge 2009 which challenged younger scientists to get a senior scientist to blog.