So this was my first Science Online London conference. With the exception of a few glitches it was an excellently organized meeing with lots of interesting sessions. There were several good sessions I attended with some being closer to my immediate interests and others less so. As usual, some presentations seemed like preaching to the choir, but maybe I've just been involved in the scene for too long? Either way, here's my recap of what I took from the conference.

Michael Nielsen started by talking about the social mechanisms involved in moving the way we do science towards an open science model.

Alex Wade talked about a new project at Microsoft, Microsoft Academic Search, suggesting that Microsoft might have suddenly realized that the international science community might be a rather lucrative potential customer. Sadly, it doesn't seem that a tool which helps scientists stay on top of the literature is high on their priority list. Instead, they focus on focused search, which is exactly oneof the tools which work fairly well. They can be improved, of course, but in contrast to an intelligent alert service, they at least exist.

Finally, I attended the workshops on the second day, specifically, the science blogging session, showing plug-ins for the WordPress software (I run lab.brembs.net on WP). Most importantly for me, I installed a set of plugins that allows the authors to insert citations to scientific papers into a blog post and then automatically inserts a list of references at the end of the blog post. Unfortunately, these plugins don't work with the provider that I use (I'm negotiating that), so you will have to go to the demo-site to see some example posts: blogs.scienceonlinelondon.org.

In general, the conference must obviously have been a success, as the Twitter hashtag for the conference, #solo11, was trending for some time on the first day and hence received a fair amount of Twitter-spam. Most disturbingly, even the Howard Hughes Medical Institute seemed to grab this opportunity to spam conference participants with job advertisements.

One point that demonstrated that the attendees of this conference are indeed the avante-garde of science are the many technical glitches and things that didn't work as they should. Clearly, these are all instances demonstrating how immature online technology still is and that much remains to be done before the mass of bench researchers is going to be able to use these tools and incorporate them into their workflow.