C&E News article on ONS and FriendFeed

Carmen Drahl's article following her visit to my lab has just appeared online on Chemical and Engineering News:
(February 9, 2009 Volume 87, Number 06 p. 34).

I think she really captured the essence of our Open Notebook Science solubility project and how to make those results available in an intuitive way via web queries and Second Life tools. Rajarshi Guha and Andrew Lang's work is demonstrated here. The text description is very helpful but it is her video recordings that really stand out. There are two screencasts from Second Life: one from my class where I ran an organic chemistry quiz race and another demonstrating the Ugi solubility explorer.

Carmen also recorded a very good overview of how we use FriendFeed to collaborate with other researchers. The life science and Open Science communities are very strong right now on FriendFeed and hopefully this demonstration will encourage more chemists to participate. To illustrate how easy it is to connect with new people she shows how the "like button" enabled a link to be formed when Egon Willighagen liked one of her posts.