Stamen talk

Stamen talk

Stamen is a hip online design outfit based in San Francisco. They’re well known for working on data visualizations for Trulia and Digg, and their own high profile websites like Oakland Crime Map and Cabspotting. Last week we were lucky enough to get founder Eric Rodenbeck to come in to give us a talk, which I will now liveblog eight days after the fact…  … Read more

Indelible Ink

Indelible Ink

Considerable time and effort goes into producing print copies of journals, both here at Nature and at other scientific publishers. It’s something that pains my web publishing heart. Is print really necessary? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? If they do, are those benefits to consumers… or really just to us publishers? If we dropped print altogether could the savings fund a free bar at the next NPG xmas party? Certainly print still has the edge over online in some situations. I’m a recent convert to the print version of Nature journal – it’s far easier to browse bitty front  … Read more

Science in the Streamosphere

Science in the Streamosphere

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  … Read more