♫ PCR, When you need to know who the Daddy is ♫ … ♫ There was a time when to amplify DNA, You had to grow tons and tons of tiny cells. Then along came a guy named Dr. Kary Mullis, Said you can amplify in vitro just as well. Just mix your template with […]

There is a famous place in London town, inside Hyde Park, known as Speakers’ Corner. It is a space where free speech and self-expression prevail. At Speakers’ Corner, anyone can say anything they like about anything they want to anyone who cares to listen. There are some obvious parallels between blogging and Speakers’ Corner as well as one rather striking difference.

As of 2007, the Internet is mostly still a wild untamed jungle. Many people have tried to chart the territory, but what should a map of the internet look like? One of my favourite maps is “The Web Is Agreement” by Paul Downey. Paul’s map has a Tolkien-like Lord of the Rings feel to it, so instead of Microsoft we have Mordorsoft. The all seeing eye of Sauron is Google of course, helping search, but raising privacy concerns.

Taking down A.I. town? The Semantic Web is (quote) “a new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers”. It will “unleash a revolution of new possibilities” using a magical “new” artificially intelligent technology called ontology. So says a much-cited article in Scientific American published back in May 2001.

Sometimes I wonder what what the point of blogging is and just how much time people (myself included) waste reading and writing them. Let’s face it, most leading scientists are too damn busy to pay much attention to the blogosphere, especially when it descends (as it frequently does) into “uncontrollable verbal discharge”. This unfortunate medical condition is also known as Blogorrhoea.

The American poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron once famously remarked that The Revolution Will Not Be Televised [1]. Science has undergone its own quiet revolution since the invention of the Web back in 1990. This has slowly but surely changed scientific communication, not just a Revolution but a “Webolution” [2] if you like. The recent addition of television to the Web means that, to paraphrase Gil, the Webolution will be televised.

Calling all Scientists, is your hair luxuriant and flowing? Perhaps you’re a bouffant bioinformatician, a hairy hacker or share a lab with somebody who is? If this is you, its high-time you joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.

The Hitch-hiking novelist Douglas Noel Adams (DNA) once remarked that the World Wide Web (WWW) is the only thing whose shortened form – ‘double-you double-you double-you-dot’ – takes three times longer to say than what it’s “short” for [1]. If he were still with us today, there is plenty of stuff at the 16 ^th International World Wide Web conference (WWW2007), currently underway in Banff, that would interest him.

The Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), will soon be publishing their special issue on Semantic Biomedical Mashups (can you fit any more buzzwords into a Call For Papers?!). Ben Good and friends have submitted a paper on their Entity Describer which extends connotea using some Semantic Web goodness. They’d appreciate your comments on their submitted manuscript over at i9606.

As well as big famous superstars at Science Foo Camp (scifoo), there is a chance to meet and “geek out” with younger engineers and scientists like Vince Smith, Aaron Schwartz and Vaughan Bell. Aaron Schwartz and the open library project On Sunday at scifoo, Aaron (of archive.org) gave a quick demo of the Open Library.

On day three of Science Foo Camp (scifoo) biologist Lincoln Stein (picture right) gave a presenation on what he calls “genome voyeurism”, using Jim Watsons genome as an example.