What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

The new best of FriendFeed feature is proving to be a hit. It also provides material for people who are too busy to write real blog posts. Here’s my top 10, according to FriendFeed, from the past 7 days:

• We’re all looking forward to having an insider at Amazon Web Services
• Cameron explains FriendFeed for scientists
• A variety of (non-serious) explanations for the falling number of Google searches for bioinformatics-related keywords
• Our thoughts on certifying online research
• Get to know Prochlorococcus – you’re probably breathing the by-product of its metabolism right now
• Pierre on sorting articles by journal impact factor
• Could XMPP be the new MPI?
• Welcoming new members to the Life Scientists room
• Who’s off to ISMB 2008?
• Paris area employers: call this talented man

Seems almost compulsory for web2.0 enthusiasts to write a brief greasemonkey article these days!

Here’s my attempt. Nothing whatsoever to do with bioinformatics; instead, this one resizes Flickr images on Profilactic mashup pages, such as this one. My aim is just to convince you that greasemonkey development is quite easy, even for JavaScript novices like myself.
Read the rest…

In yet another moment of BBGM synchronicity, I started to think about lifestreaming and its applications as Deepak wrote about it. My inspiration was the recent article 35 ways to stream your life.

I’ve tried (and you can find me at):

• Mugshot – aggregates a limited number of sources, doesn’t seem to update properly from del.icio.us, has conversation features (quips, comments)
• FriendFeed – nice look and feel, a limited number of sources, has conversation features (comments, ratings)
• Profilactic – by far my favourite in terms of look/feel and sources (you can add anything that has a feed) but no conversations as yet

Lifestreams are fun. I don’t expect anyone to care about what I just played on last.fm (and likewise), but these are all ways of broadcasting yourself and making connections. Read Deepak’s post for some thoughts on how this might apply to science.

Here’s a crazy idea – the workstream:

• Neil parsed SwissProt entry Q38897 using parser script swiss2features.pl
• Bob calculated all intersubunit contacts in PDB entry 2jdq using CCP4 package contact

No?