Fuzzier Logic » microblog

Now that’s what I call microblogging

Simon — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:29:03 +0000

As noted previously, ISMB is underway, and the FriendFeeders present are working hard to keep the rest of us updated on what’s going on.

I just wanted to highlight the coverage of this morning’s keynote, which was absolutely exemplary.

ISMB – attending without travelling

Simon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:52:23 +0000

It’s ISMB time again, and as colleagues jet off to Stockholm, I can’t help but feel that twinge of envy. Lucky then, that the conference organisers have a fantastic attitude towards live- and micro-bloggers, and after the success of last year’s efforts (see the FriendFeed room, and the paper), they are positively encouraging more of the same this year. There’s a FriendFeed room again, where a new thread will be posted 10 minutes before each talk, and with a number of dedicated FFers present, there’s sure to be some fantastic live coverage. I’ll be following along.

Twitter and Me

Simon — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:47:10 +0000

This is a bit of a follow-up to my post about FriendFeed. I registered for Twitter at the same time as FriendFeed, and while I immediately saw the value of FF for a long time I only saw Twitter as a tool to broadcast work-related ideas and thoughts to FriendFeed. I saw it as having little utility in it’s own right.

My follower/following count slowly increased, driven by FF, I tended to reciprocally follow people, and the few people who were following me found me there. Then, early this year, David Bradley posted his list of 100+ Scientwists, and I thought: ‘hey, I’m a scientist, and on Twitter… maybe I should be on that list”. So I got included, and then got a sudden upsurge in followers.

Not all these followers were on FF anymore, so I couldn’t follow my Twitter traffic on FF (without creating a whole bunch of imaginary friends, which I didn’t want to do). So I had to start following Twitter properly.

This has led to a more interesting conversation developing. I post more @replies, and am receiving a few more in return (though often from the desk next to me in the office), and though I don’t have any specific examples like I did for FF, I feel I am gaining more value from Twitter as a tool in its own right.

I have tried a number of apps to monitor Twitter traffic, but none of them quite fit into my workflow properly (though TweetDeck comes closest, and is much better than Twhirl). However, I got a 3G iPhone yesterday, the Twitterific App seems great, and in the future I suspect most of my Tweeting will be done on that platform.

Finally, there has been a lot written about Twitter in the last couple of weeks, and in particular about the number of ‘celebrities’ tweeting, both real and fake. For my part, I do follow a few, and get most value from @stephenfry (bonus linky), who really seems to ‘get it’ (as he does most things, though how he keeps track following over 30k people, I’ll never know), and @dave_gorman (bonus linky), who, like me, is just learning the value of the platform. But the real value of Twitter is again, like FF, in the quality of the science conversation on there, and how it makes me feel connected to a worldwide community of like-minded people.

FriendFeed and Me

Simon — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:36:35 +0000

Apparently its bad for a blog to be introspective, and always about the author. But I’m unrepentant. What do people write about if not themselves, even indirectly? So here’s another post about me, and about my participation in a small web revolution.

Next week marks 6 months since I registered my account at FriendFeed (and simultaneously, Twitter). Ally posted yesterday about her moment of epiphany with the ‘lifestreaming’ site, and I know other people have blogged about it’s impact on their online lives, and I thought I’d do the same as a bit of a retrospective.

Briefly, FriendFeed is a site that aggregates information from other sites, and shares it with the world. I collate the feeds from this blog, Twitter, CiteULike.org, del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader and a few others there. People can subscribe to this amalgamated feed, and get an idea of my interests and what I am upto.

I try to limit my activity on FF (and, consequently, Twitter) to stuff that’s purely work-related (although real life does occasionally creep in), and because of this ‘work-stream’ approach, it has become an increasingly indispensable tool in the pipeline of information discovery and my scientific ‘social life’.

The following are a (direct or indirect) result of my participation at FF:

I have finally learnt Python, and made it my programming language of choice
I have adopted Git for version control, and have several repos on GitHub
I bought this domain, and set up this blog
Found countless papers and blogs I may have missed

As a more concrete example of the power of FF, I am currently involved in a project looking at co-evolution of bacterial proteins, and am employing Statistical Coupling Analysis to score multiple sequence alignments. This method produced thousands of scores across an alignment, and the best way of viewing them is by constructing a sort of heatmap. I was using Gnuplot to do this, and my maps looked something like this:

This is not terribly useful, because you keep having to check the legend to see whether red is ‘hotter’ or ‘colder’ than yellow, etc. Then, one morning last week, I saw a link on FriendFeed to this blog post, and following the very wise suggestions in that post, I worked out how to redraw my plots so they now look like this:

This makes it much easier to tell at a glance where the hotspots are to be found in the alignment. It is just one blog post, but I would never have found it without FF, and it is a useful illustration of how this new workflow has changed my productivity.

So, for the next six months, and on into the more distant future, what role do I see for FF in my work life? Well, for a start I need to participate more. I am constantly aware that I should comment more, and even just ‘like’ more stuff. Contribution should also take the form of propogating things to FF for others to see. Most of my Feed consists of articles at CiteULike and Tweets. By posting more stuff to FF directly, and by sharing interesting articles on Google Reader, I’ll be providing more grist to the mill of conversation than I currently do. And I want to be an active member of this community, I like the people, I’ve got a lot out of the last 6 months of (relatively) passive interaction, and want that to continue, but I should no longer be a passenger.