The Internet, the way it should be is here. Well, it is not actually here but there are signs, tremors and whispers. The future has been glimpsed and we want it.
I was going to spend today’s post talking about effective ways to partition graduate work-day, but late in the evening I came across a particularly interesting tweet by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore. He talked about five web technologies to watch in 2011 – and one of them, most exciting one, is real-time-click-stream sharing. In a nutshell: your social network sees what you are surfing while you are surfing them Internets. You can also define who can see what, when and how. The full article is available on Mashable/Tech (http://mashable.com/2011/01/05/web-technologies-2011/).
It is obvious how these types of services is a natural extension of the social-network boom that we have experienced since the likes of myspace and facebook joined the Internet playground. What I want to talk about here is an extension of the online conversation that such services afford, and the revolutionary way in which this conversation-extension can impact scientific communication.
Lets do this one step at a time. What exactly do I mean by conversation extension. Conversation can be fluid, these start, proceed and conclude in one session and conversation can be interuprtable. For example our emails are interuptable (message, time, reply). Originally emails contained loads of information precisely because of the response wait-period. Turns out people wanted to use email for short communication and conversations, these desires birthed instant messaging and texting (SMS). Instant messaging is more like a conversation. Success of instant messaging made us (the consumer) want to talk/share with more and more people at once. Naturally this paved the way for social networking, which is both continuous (since we never really stop existing as part of a network) and interuptable (post-by-post timeline approach).
This next part is key. Lets ask ourselves what do we talk about on social networking sites? We talk about things/media that we have recently ingested. Its not that we lack originality, we just channel it into opinion about information. Now we want to share the media that we are consuming among large groups of individuals as fast as we can. The fastest way to do it is while we are consuming it. This is a very interesting and dynamic way to converse. Now we can skip the description part and dive right into a discussion with our friends.
Lets bring this back to science. Fact, technological progress during the last few decades has created a richer brand of research science that can only be done by TEAMS of scientist. Internet (as an idea) has removed all geographical constrains on the make-up of such teams. Unfortunately routes of communication have remained poor, most successful of which is the wiki setup. The problem is that a wiki has to be maintained, updated and organized, but scientists want to do science instead of playing with code.
Imagine a world where your collaborators can see the articles you are pulling up from Genbank, PubMed and the like. These are searchable and catalogued, and can be sorted whichever way you wish. Some can be even starred, branding them according to importance. All of this without forwarding, copying and pasting, attaching and deleting. Your research group is a hub in your social network, and has a dedicated (limited by relevance) glimpse into your media consumption. Finally after a decade or so, the Internet is here and it wants to hug you.
