Back from Science Bloging 2008

Like last year, the North Carolina Science Blogging conference was a hit.

I moderated a session on public scientific data with Xan Gregg. Both of our talks were recorded and available here. (I used SciVee this time to store the screencast and was even able to use their supplementary document option to store the mp3 that Feedburner properly processed in the podcast feed.)

We spent about half the session with presenting then there was an active discussion. (Hopefully someone got some decent audio on that part and I'll post a link here if possible.) The usual issues of scalability, findability, fundability, scooping, academic validation and government policy came up. No resolution on any of these of course but that's not the point of the gathering. Some new contacts were made and maybe that will lead to some progress on the Open Science front.

Speaking of new contacts, I was quite pleased to meet Moshe Pritsker from JoVE. He said that his camera people would come to my lab to record some experiments. Any students in the UsefulChem lab who would like to get involved - lets discuss it.

Having the chance to touch base with friends like Bill Hooker, Deepak Singh and Antony Williams was certainly a bonus.

I also enjoyed Hemai Parthasarathy's session in the morning on Open Science. She did a great job in moderating the discussion, which was really a brainstorming session on how the scientific publication process could and should evolve.

Bora has a comprehensive list of pre and post-conference blogging, pics and videos.