11 and a half (week 2 thing 3) things

I'm already begining to lose track of what I've done for 23 Things and what I'm doing for 11-and-a-half Things but it doens't really matter since I'm sure they will overlap anyway. I'm pretty sure I won't end up doing 34-and-a-half-Things....

Anyway 11-and-a-half (can I call this EAAH for short?) this week has me looking for social networking sites, especially for scientists. So here goes: there is Nature Network which describes itself as the 'professional networking website for scientists around the world' hosted by the Nature Publishing Group. As you'd expect, there's a collection for forums, blogs, discussion topics, as well as lists of 'neetworked' people and a helpful Q&A section. You can look at the blogs, forums etc without logging in. And apparently 'NPG Libraries' is the third 'most active' Group! I was quite impressed that a search by affiliation for Univeristy College London has over 150 hits. (searching UCL brings back results from UCLA, etc)

Another site which I stumbled across is BioMedExperts. You can't have a proper look at this one until you register, but you can have a sneak at what members' profiles look like if you use Google's advanced search - search for a name and specify within the site biomedexperts.com. It seems to be a little bot more like an online space to publicise yourself, your research activites, publications, etc.

I was alerted this morning to a newish looking site, Knowledge Blog . This is a JISC funded intiative with the aim to bring researchers together to discuss their work yet avoiding the hassle and delays of traditional  publshing/reviwing/disseminating/discussing routes. The idea is that people 'publish' their articles as blog posts, which are then peer reviewed by suitable selected experts, who also reply by blog - so the whole process is completely open (see How it works)

It seems to me that social networking is still in its infancy and in a few years time some winners will emerge on top and some losers will shuffle to the bottom into obscurity and the cyber-graveyard.... until then, any one researcher can't possibly keep up with many of the possibilities on offer for social networking - that;'s if they have the time to get involved at all! A recent RIN report has some nice nuggets of feedback from researchers about all this.