There are so many things that we still want to do with the site that it feels very much like a work in progress to those of us spending our days (and nights) on it. But we're delighted that the judges already consider it useful and impressive. And thanks also to David P for the kind namecheck on BoingBoing.

I was hoping to coin 'the streamosphere' but it's already in Google. Neh. Anyway...

The last month or two has seen many science 2.0 (for lack of a better term) bloggers pick up Twitter and FriendFeed.

If you've never heard of the former then you probably shouldn't be reading Nascent. The latter is an activity aggregator: you sign up, tell it which other services you use (del.icio.us? last.fm? blogs?) and it generates a page listing all of your public activity across those services like the Facebook mini-feed writ large. You can see feeds from your friends and attach short comments to their activity.

Services like these are less effort than blogging and you get more instant feedback in the form of little smiley faces from other users. The downside is that with everybody communicating in SMS-length 128 character bursts it can feel a little bit like one of those 'txt cafe' premium hotlines you see advertised on satellite TV late at night, albeit with fewer muscley bikers and bikini'ed hot-tubbers (Nature staff excepted).

If that description hasn't put you off too much it's worth dipping a toe into the activity stream. For the social networking aspect to work you really need a social network, so I've listed a couple of science bloggers below with links to their FriendFeed accounts. Not quite a blogroll... a twitlist? Maybe not. ;) You can follow people without having them follow you, so don't be shy (but don't expect a follow in return straight away):

• Andrew Perry - of Your Bones Got a Little Machine
• Andrew Walkingshaw - of Brighten the Corners
• Attila Csordas - of Pimm
• Cameron Neylon - of Science in the Open
• Deepak Singh - of BBGM
• JC Bradley - of Useful Chemistry
• Jason Stajich - of Stajichlog
• Matt Wood - of Green is Good
• Michael Barton - of Bioinformatics Zen
• Neil Saunders - of WYDIRD
• Pawel Szczesny - of Freelancing Science
• Pedro Beltrao - of Public Rambling
• Ricardo Vidal - of My Biotech Life

See you there!

Nature put an awesome billboard Podcast advert up in the Gaslamp district of San Diego around the time of the FASEB and AACR conferences. Just in case you're wondering, the poster girl silhouette is that of Nature Reviews Neuroscience editor Monica Hoyos Flight.

Listen to the podcast here.

The article itself is a successful experiment in using Web 2.0 to its full - Mitch originally posted a draft and invited readers to comment, before the final version was published the old-school way.

Barcamb 2 has just been announced. This is a bar camp that is hosted by the Sanger institute in Cambridge with a focus on technologies related to science. Last year's was a blast, and you can read a writeup of that event.

The organisers have set up a Meetup Page where you can sign up for the meeting, and a Barcamb Wiki describing the event.

If you have a chance to make it you should definitely try to get along.

Make a video summing up what "It's in my nature.com" means to you, be it: your love of science, your research, your scientific personality or even www.nature.com... funny, serious and/or creative submissions welcome. To enter, upload your video to the It’s in my nature.com group on Facebook. Then email one of the It's in my nature.com group admins your details (name, email address, link to your video and your Nature Network or Facebook profile). Your video files should be under 100 MB, shorter than 2 minutes (unless compellingly watchable), comply with Facebook video rules and submitted by midnight GMT 12 May 2008.

Competition entrants must be Nature Network registered users and/or members of It's in my nature.com. Employees of Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan or their families are not eligible. It's in my nature.com reserves the right to remove videos that are obscene, libellous/slanderous and/or judged to be offensive. It's in my nature.com accepts no responsibility for the content of the videos or accidents involved during production... we recommend using your low-tech mobile phone camera over the ethidium bromide stained 8 megapixel digital camera attached to the photographic hood in your lab. Rumour has it that the prize is a top-of-the-range Sony camcorder. Judges (It's in my nature.com group admins and other employees of Nature Publishing Group) will shortlist three video submissions, from which the winner will be voted for by the It's in my nature.com Facebook group.

He managed to jam in about 90 slides in 45 minutes, so I'm mostly going to paraphrase what he was saying in his presentation, as it went by so quickly.

As this is quite a long blog post I'll save you the trouble or reading it by giving away the ending right now, the main theme that Jeff talked about was data. Lot's of data, almost mind staggeringly huge volumes of data, and how to deal with it all. The answer is to construct a system in which each of the nodes (or sensors) reporting information provides that information in a format that can be stitched together in a contextually aware way. By stepping away from extracting a signal from one piece of datum, and instead building a way to look at the context in which that datum lives you can solve interesting problems. That's kind of the big picture.

At the end of his talk he also entertained us with some of his thoughts on diverse topics, from the total surveillance state to how safe is the world really? The longer write up is below the break.

This week, we at NN were really excited to see for the first time the Nature Network pub night being franchised in other cities. Way to go! On Tuesday, scientists in Berlin gathered and on Wed, scientists in NYC got together. You can read the reports from their events here and here.

So I would encourage any of you in other cities that are hotbeds of science to organize your own networking events for scientists. It's easy. Just set up a group on Nature Network, invite your friends to join it, get them to invite their friends, pick a date, time, and place and away you go. Let the editors know too (network at nature.com) so that we can help you promote the event. We'll also send you cool NN swag to give away.

In parallel with the publication of the paperback, Clive James’s ‘intellectual autobiography’, Cultural Amnesia, is also being published as the first in our series of ‘special edition’ eBooks, featuring extra material not available in the print version and including a specially written foreword by Clive James.

We’re offering this eBook DRM-free; this is a deliberate choice on the part of both Pan Macmillan and Clive James. What we hope is that this will be a positive experience for our readers as well as contributing to the growing body of evidence that DRM-free is the way forward for digital publishing.

I'm told that this is the first DRM-free ebook from a mainstream author and major publisher in the UK. Yeah! :)

The Picador blog has more from the author himself.

Well, OK, perhaps I oversold this blog entry in the title a little, but what I want to describe is my experience of using Twitter during a conference, and how its use extended the experience of the conference. The conference experience being so important for scientists means that this may well be a good scientific application for Twitter. Hashtags is a site that tracks words prepended with a hash that appear on Twitter, and displays all of them on one page, with a small graph showing the rise and fall of usage of the tag over time. Last week I was at the Open Repositories meeting in Southampton and there were a good few people at the meeting using Twitter. We used the tag OR08, and during the course of the meeting using the Hashtags site I was able to get a feel about what was going on in some of the other sessions, but even more interestingly during specific talks small micro conversations about the presentation emerged through Twitter. It was not only a fun experience, but it definitely enriched the experience of the conference.

Lorcan Dempsey recently described the idea of the amplified conference, where the adoption of new social media tools sends out tremors in the social graph of people who follow others attending various meetings, and I really like this model for what is going on here. Any one blog post, or tweet, on its own might pass below the radar, but a sudden burst tells the story that there might be something interesting going on.

Of course Twitter is not the only player in this space. Eventtrack also looks interesting (thanks Gavin!), and with many moves going on towards personal aggregation, over time more such sites are going to emerge. At the moment these aggregation sites are looking at event based trails through a message space. Each tweet is an event in this space, and the openness of Twitter makes it very easy to track the rise and fall of messages with specific tags. One could certainly think of academic papers as events in an academic paper-space. One wonders why there are not more trackers for signals and bursts in the scientific literature.