A thought on nodalpoint

July 16, 2007

When I first started perusing nodalpoint I wasn’t a frequent visitor. Those were the days when the site was very slow, but that was all in the past. The site is slick, fast, and one that I visit often. The other day I responded to Neil’s post about nodalpoint being the center of the open science universe. In that I said that there should be no central hub for open science, e.g. the nodalpoint wiki. However, as I was checking out the site today, I realized that nodalpoint is not doing as well as it should. The bioinformatics world at least needs a community hub, and nodalpoint can be that hub. It has a loyal user base and is a rich source of information. I have been lax in contributing to that community, and have treated it more as a blog and less as a community, so hereon, I will try to be a better citizen. Probably won’t post over there (I wish nodalpoint would aggregate posts from its members), but do plan to participate as much I can.

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Blog, Informatics 


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Comments

3 Responses to “A thought on nodalpoint”

  1. Pawel on July 17th, 2007 9:45 am

    You’ve probably heard about Wikiomics or Bioinformatics.org. They also have rich user base and plenty of useful information. All three differ significantly. None of them qualifies as a central community hub - only because the research area is way too wide to create a single site like that. You’d get equivalent of “the whole microbiology encyclopedia” focused only on E. coli.

  2. Neil on July 17th, 2007 6:57 pm

    I left a comment yesterday but it vanished. Aggregating member posts at Nodalpoint is a great idea which I’ve now set up - see the post at Nodal for details.

  3. Andrew Walkingshaw on July 18th, 2007 6:26 am

    I don’t think there can be a centre while there’s so much variation in the science we do. I rarely visit Nodalpoint, because I work on things that stay still (materials and minerals), not things that move under their own power - so whatever it were to do, it’d be unlikely to capture me and some of my colleagues…

    That doesn’t mean we don’t have some areas of common interest, though. How we foster those is a difficult question.

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