Nascent

Here's my not-particularly-insightful prediction for the web next year: activity aggregation is going to be hot. It started with the Facebook news feed, piggybacked on the Twitter driven lifestreaming bandwagon and will finally reach maturity on sites like Noserub, Friendfeed and Google's new social networking platform.

For those unfamiliar with the concept here's the idea:

1. You sign up to an aggregator service

2. You tell it what your other usernames are (on Digg, Delicious, Wikipedia, Last.fm, wherever)

3. A page that aggregates all of your activity is created. When you post something to Flickr or edit a wikipedia entry etc. etc. it gets listed on this page automagically.

4. Your friends and contacts from the sites you listed in (2) are imported into the system and matched to other users of the aggregator.

5. You get access to their aggregated activity pages.

The point of all this is that you can track what your friends and colleagues are doing across multiple sites. Neat idea if you've got lots of web savvy contacts.

'Web savvy contacts' aren't usually something that researchers have in great abundance but I think that this idea has tremendous potential for scientists too. One of the problems with user generated content in science is that there's no established reward system for contributing to something like OpenWetWare, editing a UniProt entry, depositing a gene sequence or writing a good blog post.

The concept of microattribution - credit for contributions that aren't publications - is something that we've thought about before at NPG; Nature Genetics carried an editorial on the subject back in August (see blog coverage here and here).

The way funding agencies and tenure panels assess scientists isn't going to change any time soon, realistically, but activity aggregation can help in a small, immediate way by increasing the exposure that these potentially valuable but often overlooked contributions get.

It'd do this by collecting all of those contributions in one, easy to find place (the activity page) and describing how to credit the author for them.

Imagine that every scientist had a profile page which contained a filterable record of their scientific activity - submitted this gene sequence, renamed this Gene Ontology term, edited this protocol. Might this be a step towards making these contributions more valuable to somebody's career? It'd be a bit like having an detailed interactive resume.

We would also index contribution metadata, making the whole thing searchable so that it'd be easy to find new collaborators - you could get a list of everybody who has worked on a gene that you're interested in before, for example, ordered by the number of relevant contributions that they've made.

I linked to a Nature Network profile page before because hey, they'd be a good place to put this kind of thing. Network profile pages are pretty high up in Google rankings, usually (they have good Gooju?). Of course any system that could materially affect people's careers should be open and distributed - what if Nature went evil and started charging recruiters for access to your contributions? Or started charging you to remove the record of that embarrassing, drunken Wikipedia edit? It'd have to be possible to move the record of your contributions from one place to another.

Any thoughts?