Nature Network Blogging Conference

I was at Nature yesterday and talked to Matt Brown who runs Nature Network. He’s setting up a meeting – see Science Blogging Conference: Full Steam Ahead . The date seems to have crystallised on 2008-08-30 in London at the Royal Institution.

This is a great way to spend a Saturday – the RI is worth a visit in itself. And so is London.

We sat in a cafe opposite the British Museum and talked about why blogs and social networks do and don’t work.

Nature Networks also runs RL meetings and I’m much in favour of this. Blogs and other social networks can be good ways of meeting and taking a shared purpose forward. Are they a good way of developing that social purpose? Sometimes, but sometimes it helps to meet IRL.

How about a grand challenge project? Open drug discovery? With Open Notebook science? GSK has just put (Gavin Baker reports) all their cell lines into the “public domain” (not sure exactly what licence or antilicence, and I’ll blog that later). What could the blogosphere do with that? It could be enormous.

And, by chance, Matt studied at York and worked in the lab run by crystallographers Guy and Eleanor Dodson who I was just off to meet at the Wellcome building. They remember him.

But the Wellcome and crystallography in 1951 is a separate post.