Blogs That Make Me Think

Hari Jayaram just listed my blog as one that makes him think. Keeping the meme going, I'll list 5 that have had an impact on me.

1. Beth's Second Life Beth Ritter-Guth has been a huge inspiration for me and she is the main reason I pulled the trigger on getting involved with Second Life for my teaching and research. We have collaborated on many other projects involving social software and new approaches to education - Google her name for many more goodies.

2. Chem-bla-ics Egon Willighagen has been instrumental to the cheminformatics community. From the description on his blog: "chemblaics only uses open source software, making experimental results reproducable and validatable". What I like about his blog is that he posts or links to real usable code (like chemistry enhancing GreaseMonkey scripts) or implements simple but powerful tools that can be used immediately (like making Chemical Blogspace more semantically aware).

3. Peter Murray-Rust's blog - Peter is a pioneer of cheminformatics, including the creation of Chemical Markup Language (CML) with Henry Rzepa. For anyone working in any area of cheminformatics and Open Chemistry, his blog is indispensable.

4. Open Reading Frame Bill Hooker is one of the strongest champions of Open Science that I know and has written probably the most comprehensive series of articles on the topic that I have seen.

5. business/bytes/genes/molecules Deepak Singh tends to write about stuff that interests me. Although there are many bioinformatics blogs out there, most of them don't have a high enough signal to noise ratio to make it to my most frequently checked list.

I didn't include several other blogs that I also follow closely - I'll add these to my blogroll shortly (which I have been meaning to do for a while).

Instructions for the next group, copied from Hari's post:

(1) If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think; (2) Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme; and (3) Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.