It has been a rather hectic two weeks, but the blogosphere is still here, so what better way to announce a return to the mainstream with a new, albeit brief, edition of Things I Noticed
IRIX … RIP
Scalability.org is one of my favorite blogs. Joe Landman is opinionated and knowledgable, a perfect combination for good blogging. He has a lot to say about the demise of SGI and recently he blogged about the company ending IRIX and MIPS. Back in the day IRIX used to be my favorite *NIX distribution. Very stable, easy to use, and oh the graphics. Come to think of it, I should have ackownledged the company in my dissertation, a lot of which was done on two trusty SGI Octanes. They were wonderful machines
Of course all good things come to an end. For various reasons, and Joe covers many of those issues in various posts, SGI was not able to keep up with the competition. The rise of Linux, faster x86 (and now X86-64) chips, and high quality graphics on other plaforms pretty much took the steam out of the company, and even diehards like me eventually moved to Linux (and some to OSX)
Science and Blogging
Nonoscience is another of my favorite blogs and this post on the role of blogs as a means of science communication is arguably the best one there yet. Science and blogging are still far removed from each other. While a number of scientists have adopted such tools as Connotea and del.icio.us, blogging as a scientific communication medium is a long way from mainstream adoption. The comments in the post are also worth a good read.
Wikis, education and texts
Wikis were around before Web 2.0 became the overused phrase it is. Now the University of Georgia is using Wikis to try and pool collective knowledge into a series of online textbooks. In a way, it’s a little ironic that a tried and tested format like Wikis are turning out to be one of the more successful mediums of communication and content development in the scientific community.
I didn't knew Nonoscience was one of your favorite blogs! (actually, I still have my doubts... ;)
Yes, the Georgia Tech. project seems interesting. Wikis are "catching up" only now with the academics or should I say teh academics are doing the catching up...
I was wondering if there is (and am exploring for) a proper tool to colloborate online, for writing a research paper in all its parts. That is starting from data manipulation (spread sheets, charts etc.) to actual writing of the paper (equations, text etc.), all of it in Wiki format...
I did end up with one www.twiki.org and another www.jot.com but both have their limitations. Have you tried or are you aware of anything like this?
Thanks for the bit of info on the University of Georgia's wiki project. I think it sounds very interesting, and I'm going to follow their progress on it to see how the online textbooks idea works out.
Things I noticed #6
It has been a rather hectic two weeks, but the blogosphere is still here, so what better way to announce a return to the mainstream with a new, albeit brief, edition of Things I Noticed
IRIX … RIP
Scalability.org is one of my favorite blogs. Joe Landman is opinionated and knowledgable, a perfect combination for good blogging. He has a lot to say about the demise of SGI and recently he blogged about the company ending IRIX and MIPS. Back in the day IRIX used to be my favorite *NIX distribution. Very stable, easy to use, and oh the graphics. Come to think of it, I should have ackownledged the company in my dissertation, a lot of which was done on two trusty SGI Octanes. They were wonderful machines
Of course all good things come to an end. For various reasons, and Joe covers many of those issues in various posts, SGI was not able to keep up with the competition. The rise of Linux, faster x86 (and now X86-64) chips, and high quality graphics on other plaforms pretty much took the steam out of the company, and even diehards like me eventually moved to Linux (and some to OSX)
Science and Blogging
Nonoscience is another of my favorite blogs and this post on the role of blogs as a means of science communication is arguably the best one there yet. Science and blogging are still far removed from each other. While a number of scientists have adopted such tools as Connotea and del.icio.us, blogging as a scientific communication medium is a long way from mainstream adoption. The comments in the post are also worth a good read.
Wikis, education and texts
Wikis were around before Web 2.0 became the overused phrase it is. Now the University of Georgia is using Wikis to try and pool collective knowledge into a series of online textbooks. In a way, it’s a little ironic that a tried and tested format like Wikis are turning out to be one of the more successful mediums of communication and content development in the scientific community.
Mashup season
A really cool mashup of pubmed and postgenomic, and another mashup between pubmed and connotea, and it doesn’t end there. There is one between pubmed and citeulike as well.
Technorati Tags: SGI, Science Blogging, Blogging, Wiki, Education, Books, Mashups
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