Cloud Learning In Bioinformatics

Question

[Pals]

I am not sure if the term cloud learning is appropriate here. And this is somehow related to the post by Egon http://tinyurl.com/42opzs9. The networking sites like twitter and friend feed have been very useful in my learning and are quite effective. We have realised that the network/community of bioinformaticians has already been formed and is expanding day by day. Is there any website where we could find such communities grouped together? I just wanted to know if there is/are site/s where the scientists discuss or post blogs on the field of their expertise.

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

Jan Aerts's http://saaientist.blogspot.com/ :-) .. But ok, now I understand your question.

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

I'm not sure I understand your question. How such sites would be different from friendfeed or even biostar ?

[Pals]

of course we have 100s of blogs. http://biostar.stackexchange.com/questions/112. But I get lost sometimes and I wanted to find for example people similar to your expertise. Its just I wanted to know if there are such specific sites where only experts post what they have done in more elaborated form so that we could get into their work easily and compare with what others in the same area are doing. For example if I wanted to know how people are working for highthroughput data visualization and who are involved, can I get it through specific blog?

[Pals]

Thanks a lot Pierre for the answer. In fact, Jan Aert's blog is the root for this question. He has also mentioned in his post that this sort of blogs are somehow shadowed but in fact they are a complete resource. So I wondered if there were some sort of network to link such wonderful blogs. Thanks a lot once again.

Answer 1

[Mndoci]

I've always found such communities self organizing around existing resources. Trying to come up with a "one stop resource" rarely works. In general, within an existing resource, whether it be a mailing list, a site like Biostar or Quora, or Twitter, etc, like minded individuals will find each other. The web is inherently distributed and network self-organization is far more effective than single destinations. The key is to figure out how you are going to organize all of this at your end and where you find most value.

To summarize, I don't think there is really a silver bullet, but a combination of things ranging from finding the right networks and self organization (lists, tags, wikis) that help you find the people you are interested in finding.

Answer 2

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

IMHO opinion, a nice place to find someone by his/her field of expertise in your social network is to look in http://www.linkedin.com.

A great way to explore your (scientific-but-not-only) social network would be to ask people to write their FOAF/RDF graph (e.g: here is mine http://lindenb.github.com/foaf.xml (see the source) ) and to build a tool that would be able to query this graph.

Answer 3

[Ketil]

My answer: No.

But to elaborate a little bit, social networks may work to some extent, but lots of people are still not involved in these networks. And in your comment, you seem to be asking for some quality control - which you won't get for free in social networks either.

Perhaps I'm being overly skeptical, but I don't share Pierre's enthusiasm for FOAF and RDF, stuff like that tends to grow quite complicated, and end up being a network of people who are experts on that particular network (and associated technologies).

Your best bet is to set up a Wiki - or better, a Wikipedia page - which organizes various resources: wikis, portals, blogs, mailing lists, web forums, irc channels - by topic, and attempts to do some quality control on them.