web2.0 bubble song

a new common craft video

the guys at common craft have just released their latest video on ... blogging!

first steps!

i just wanted to mention that my son just took his first few steps on his own!

--
Sent from Google Mail for mobile | mobile.google.com

a bit of fun...

while i try and keep this blog mostly work related, i just saw this (year old) youtube video of the top gear team firing a robin reliant into space (nearly) and i immediately felt the need to share (with who is not the point)...

CrossRef basics

this slide taken from the CrossRef Basics Webinar...


... is a good, simple explanation of why we deposit and what happens when we do.

Santa Run...

just a note to say that i'm running the Disability Snowsport UK - London Santa Run 2007 on 08/12/2007 to raise money for Disability Snowsport uk - The Skiers and Boarders Charity and would really welcome your support.

Please take a moment to sponsor me...
http://www.justgiving.com/matthewllewellin

or link from the widget in the sidebar...

360 Counter

related to that last post is this new software release from Serial Solutions: 360 Counter

KBART working group

yesterday I signed up to become a member of KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools), a working group initiated by the UK Serials Group (UKSG) following its commission and publication of the report 'Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain'.

the report found that a lack of awareness on the part of many publishers of the OpenURL's capabilities and requirements is impacting the quality and timeliness of data they provide to populate knowledge bases, and thus undermining the potential of this valuable technology.

the KBART working group, to be run in conjunction with the US National Information Standards Organisation (NISO), intends to develop guidelines and educational resources to improve the supply of data to providers of knowledge bases and related tools.

i joined as a 'monitoring' member, and the first meeting is during Online on 5 december. i'll report on this further after that.

helpful desktop additions

iwantsandy
email reminder service

connotea
free online reference management, but also useful for those articles you do want to save

del.icio.us
a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's

Read it Later (Firefox extension)
allows you to save pages of interest to read later. a 'staging area' for bookmarks

Google Browser Sync (Firefox extension)
continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions

Pearl Crescent Page Saver (Firefox extension)
capture images of web pages

comment on these and add some more!

linkouts

Nature Physics editorial - Elements of style: 3, 581 (2007) doi:10.1038/nphys724

Scientific American's 60 Second Science
... building on the success of Scientific American's daily podcast of the same name, 60 Second Science aims to be comprehensive in its coverage of big stories as well as a curator of the kind of need-to-know information that doesn't show up on other sites until we've reported it first.

arxiv.org's API
The goal of the API is to allow application developers access to all of the arXiv data, search and linking facilities with an easy-to-use programmatic interface.

Portico to preserve Springer titles - KnowledgeSpeak
Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico, US, has announced an agreement with STM publisher Springer, Germany, to preserve 824 titles from the latter’s online journals collection. Additional journals published with partner societies and other third parties will be incorporated into the agreement over time. With this inclusion, over 7,200 titles have now been entrusted to the Portico archive.

Major IT and BPO firms in race for Springer arm - KnowledgeSpeak
Major IT and BPO firms together with private equity players are reportedly in the race for Scientific Publishing Services (SPS). SPS, a leading premedia and typesetting services provider for STM publishers, is majority owned by scientific and specialist information publisher Springer Science + Business Media, Germany. According to sources, the SPS deal is estimated at around $100 million.

CrossRef annual meeting summary - presentations available

all now available here.

you should definitely check out the ones from Geoff Bilder, Edward Wates and (especially) Sally Morris...

author-reader freeware

pinched straight from the lost boy link roll, here are links to two interesting pieces of software, probably most useful to authors and readers...

Publish or Perish
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents useful statistics

pubmed2wikipedia
Creates subject-area entries for Wikepedia from a set of selected PubMed articles

scopus update

from their news pages...

Amsterdam – November 07, 2007 – Scopus®, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality Web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research, today announced that it has added new features to further improve research productivity and support the researchers' workflow. The new features include the ability to search for and browse through relevant content derived from cited references, additional and flexible clustering categories in the "Refine Results" feature, the inclusion of pre-published journal articles across all subject areas - a first for any multidisciplinary abstract & citation database - and extension of the self-citation exclusion options within the Scopus Citation Tracker.

there's more information on how to take advantage here

I will certainly talk to them about establishing a feed for our FirstCite articles to take advantage of this

searchengine update

as it's a friday, here are a few of the more recent, old-ish and revamped sites for a wider variety of search results than plain old effective google...

tafiti: experimental search front-end from Microsoft; it uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search

searchmash: Google's beta mashup

ask: you know ask.com - revamped (you've probably seen the ads)

miss dewey: the fun one

two new beta sites worth signing up for the private beta (currently) and keeping a track of...
[true knowledge]: 'a website where you can ask questions about any subject and get a direct response'
powerset: a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing

CrossRef annual meeting summary (cont.)

what i left out of that post were the new CrossRef projects in the pipeline...

ticTOCs: service for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personalisable web based environment

CrossCheck: cross-publisher plagiarism detection service

WebCite: (mentioned before) archiving system for webreferences

other things were:

the Web Deposit Form: allows you to enter metadata and register DOIs

DOI tester: via the member's area (un/pw reqd) to crawl/recrawl and test validity of DOIs deposited

CrossRef annual meeting summary

this has been my first opportunity to report on the CrossRef meeting that both Stuart and I attended last week. i'm not going to go into too much detail, but give you links to the important sites so you can read more if you want. it's unfortunately the case that CrossRef have not yet (to my knowledge) released the presentations to their website, but when they do, i'll update to link through to the excellent talk ("Quality and Trust in Scholarly Publishing") given right at the end of the day by Sally Morris, ALPSP's previous CEO.

Here's the meeting agenda, biographies and presentations - the latter of which will likely be where those presentations come live.

Alex Frost, sermo: a knowledge ecosystem for physicians

Richard Kidd, RSC, Project Prospect: i've mentioned this before (see tag)

Pritpal Tamber, F1000 Medicine: post-publication peer recommendation

Edward Wates, Wiley-Blackwell: Trustworthiness: Does the publisher have a role to play?
this is another slideset you should check out when it comes online, but here are some connected links...
Author's version vs. publisher's version: an analysis of the copy-editing function
Best Practice Guidelines on Publication Ethics: a Publisher's Perspective

The post-lunch, graveyard-shift was taken by Ben Goldacre, the Guardian's Bad Science columnist/blogger: an insightful and interesting view into the minds of the media and public perception of science.

anti-facebook apps

enemybook and snubster are a welcome refreshment to the glum on fb...

STIX fonts!

31 october was a big day, but i missed it (just)... anyway - the STIX fonts have gone live - check it out...
http://www.stixfonts.org/

Tim Ingoldsby let me have a sneak peek at the arrows alone in July... amazing.

this is just the beta mind... beta phase ends 15 december

subject areas across multidisc. journals and publisher platforms

i've done some prelim work on seeing what scientific areas are covered and specified by some of the leading journals and publisher platforms. here are the findings in a not-too-easy-to-read listing...

nature publishing group's subject areas...
[over-journal]

chemistry
- chemistry
- drug discovery
- biotechnology
- materials
- methods & protocols
clinical practice & research
- cancer
- cardiovascular medicine
- dentistry
- endocrinology
- gastroenterology & hepatology
- methods & protocols
- pathology & pathobiology
- urology
earth & environment
- earth sciences
- evolution & ecology
life sciences
- biotechnology
- cancer
- development
- drug discovery
- evolution & ecology
- genetics
- immunology
- medical research
- methods & protocols
- microbiology
- molecular cell biology
- neuroscience
- pharmacology
- systems biology
physical sciences
- physics
- materials

science magazine's subject areas...
[cross-journal]

life sciences
- anatomy/morphology/biomechanics
- anthropology
- biochemistry
- botany
- cell biology
- development
- ecology
- epidemiology
- evolution
- genetics
- immunology
- medicine/diseases
- microbiology
- molecular biology
- neuroscience
- pharmacology/toxicology
- physiology
- psychology
- virology
physical sciences
- astronomy
- atmospheric science
- chemistry
- computers/mathematics
- engineering
- geochemistry/geophysics
- materials science
- oceanography
- paleontology
- physics
- physics, applied
- planetary science
other subjects
- economics
- education
- history/philosophy of science
- science and business
- science and policy
- sociology

blackwell-synergy's subject areas...
[over journal]

life and physical sciences
- astronomy and astrophysics
- biogeography
- cell and molecular biology
- chemistry
- crystallography
- developmental biology
- earth science and physical geography
- ecology
- food science and technology
- genetics and evolution
- human anatomy and physiology
- materials science
- microbiology
- microscopy
- neuroscience & neurology
- plant science
- zoology
mathematics and statistics
- mathematics
- statistics

wiley-interscience's subject areas...
[over journal]

chemistry
- analytical chemistry
- biochemistry
- chemical engineering
- chemistry (general)
- computational chemistry and molecular modeling
- environmental chemistry
- food science technology
- industrial chemistry
- inorganic chemistry
- organic chemistry
- pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry
- physical chemistry
- spectroscopy
- toxicology
earth and environmental science
- agriculture
- climatology and meteorology
- earth and environmental science (general)
- ecology
- environmental science
- geography
- geology
life sciences
- anatomy and physiology
- biological anthropology
- biology
- biotechnology
- genetics
- life sciences (general)
- microbiology and virology
- molecular cell biology
- neuroscience
mathematics and statistics
- applied mathematics
- applied probability and statistics
- data analysis and management
- mathematics (general)
- numerical methods
- statistics (general)
physics and astronomy
- astronomy
- atomic, molecular and optical physics
- physics and astronomy (general)
- quantum physics and field theory
- solid state physics
- thermal physics and statistical mechanics
polymers and materials science
- electronic materials
- general materials science
- nanotechnology and nanomaterials
- polymer science and technology

sciencedirect's subject areas...
[over journal]

physical sciences and engineering
- chemical engineering
- chemistry
- computer science
- earth and planetary sciences
- energy
- engineering
- materials science
- mathematics
- physics and astronomy
life sciences
- agricultural and biological sciences
- biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology
- environmental science
- immunology and microbiology
- neuroscience
health sciences
- medicine and dentistry
- nursing and health professions
- pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutical science
- veterinary science and veterinary medicine

common craft show

this is a great way to explain RSS to the uninitiated...



check out their other videos too...

Wikis in Plain English

Social Networking in Plain English

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

plus the ones on light bulbs and zombies (brand new for Halloween) are good fun...

linkouts

Adobe's Mars Project..
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars/

Librarian's discussion on author names…
http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/09/name-authority-control-aka-name.html

Nascent post - Aggregating scientific activity
http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2007/10/activity_aggregation.html

how google works...

to continue the thread from yesterday, this is a nice flash representation of how google does searching...
http://www.portfolio.com/images/site/editorial/Flash/google/google.swf

Michael Wesch's new video: Information R/evolution

linkouts

an interesting article from Times Online about Google and the future...

Google. Who's looking at you?
It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?

... it ends early, but the guardian sorts that out, and poo-poo's it here. And you can see James Fallows moderate a discussion with Google co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Zeitgeist '07 here.

the new version of Inspec...

Inspec Direct - http://inspecdirect.theiet.org/
New web-based version of the Inspec Database to debut in January 2008

web assets

this is a post worth reading, from Scott Karp at Publish2:
Forget Platforms And Applications, Data Is The Real Asset On the Web

... and it kind of connects to the last link in the linkouts post of Oct 16 - which pitched data against documents.

this is a big thing to get my head round, but i guess a lot of it is common sense. and as a publisher, we should act to move in this direction... certainly in relation to the first post. the post above is talking in a more technical frame. however, we do have valuable data that we could benefit from allowing others to use - sensibly, of course.

for a small publisher this is an extreme challenge. as you have to fulfill pretty much every step along the way within a small group. this is certainly true for us. but as for most other advancements, the element of planning here is key. the almost impossible task of getting hold of good data is already taken care of.

Royal Society movers and shakers

well, as far as we're concerned, there's the release of the Hooke Folio by the library (didn't involve us here in publishing, i'm sad to say...), there's the fact that the Royal Society Digital Journal Archive is free again (and has been since september 1) until the end of november and the launch of the new RS corporate identity - from www.royalsoc.ac.uk to royalsociety.org, which means our two sites will move over to publishing.royalsociety.org and journals.royalsociety.org.

citation and data availability

this is old hat, but i thought i'd post on it...

Piwowar HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB (2007) Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLoS ONE 2(3): e308

background
Sharing research data provides benefit to the general scientific community, but the benefit is less obvious for the investigator who makes his or her data available.

principal findings
We examined the citation history of 85 cancer microarray clinical trial publications with respect to the availability of their data. The 48% of trials with publicly available microarray data received 85% of the aggregate citations. Publicly available data was significantly (p = 0.006) associated with a 69% increase in citations, independently of journal impact factor, date of publication, and author country of origin using linear regression.

significance
This correlation between publicly available data and increased literature impact may further motivate investigators to share their detailed research data.

linkouts

so here's a few things i've spotted today...

three posts on the CrossTech blog:
NLM Blog Citation Guidelines
an interesting few issues raised here, and the link to WebCite, something we should seriously consider.
I Want My XMP
this is something i feel we should to monitor, but we'll need another bigger publisher or adobe themselves to do the hard work on to make it workable for us...
Metadata - For the Record
more on XMP and adobe's line...

and a link that i got from the lost boy feed that i'm listening to / watching right now and seems pretty interesting stuff...
From the Web of Documents to the Web of Data

history of nature

this is a really nice project - especially good is the timeline... all worth a view...

Royal Society releases Hooke Folio

this is a pretty cool app - taken from BL technology...

we'll be looking to link through or host this stuff on our own 'journals' site soon...

links from a previous (september) internal e-update

papers - a scientist's appl. for organizing on a Mac
http://mekentosj.com/papers/

IOPP paper size changes
http://www.iop.org/EJ/news/-topic=1247/

PubMed as a Search Engine [from PubMed New and Noteworthy]
PubMed is now available as a search engine add-on on the search bar in the upper-right corner of Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0.
From a PubMed Web page, click the search box drop down arrow next to the default search engine Google, and then select Add PubMed search.

Rapleaf - online reputation look-up
http://www.rapleaf.com/

links from a previous (august) internal e-update

Microsoft and STM Publishers Meet to Discuss DOCX / Word 2007
http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2007/08/microsoft_and_stm_publishers_m.html

Context Aware Image Re-Sizing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns

Article and interview with Nature's Timo Hannay (Head of Web Publishing)
http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/web-20-in-science/
http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2007/07/interview-with-timo-hannay-head-of-web.html

PDF/A conformance center
http://pdfa.org

Tafiti -- Microsoft redefines the search interface with Silverlight
http://www.tafiti.com/

Amazon: A New Kind of Publisher
http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2007/08/amazon_a_new_kind_of_publisher_1.html

DIGG THE BEEB: BBC Adds Buttons for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon
http://mashable.com/2007/08/16/bbc-bookmarking/

STIX Fonts Project Update - Almost Finished!
http://www.stixfonts.org/

nanoHub - online simulation and more
http://www.nanohub.org/

booktwo

you might be interested to see this project, which connects print with the web… it got a v good reception at a recent O'Reilly conference…

http://www.booktwo.org/notebook/the-bluebook/

interview with designer…
http://printisdeadblog.com/2007/07/09/blink-tank-a-conversation-with-manolis-kelaidis/
[interestingly, this interview was conducted by Jeff Gomez, Director of Internet Marketing at Holtzbrinck (Nature's ultimate parent company)]

prepress supplier merger

S R NOVA announces strategic merger with TECHSET

Bangalore, India, September 2007 - S R Nova and Techset, two major e-publishing Services Companies and specialists in the STM segment, today announced the strategic merger of the operations.

Eric Schmidt's 2.0 vs 3.0

Eric Schmidt being quite erudite and concise (not common in this area, I find) about the future of the web...

a new concerted effort

so - i'm going to give it a go again...

and i know you're supposed to write useful, meaningful things regularly... but i'll work on that.

reading - nearly finished - Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum - now there's a challenge!

what is the future of text online?

this is an interesting post that i picked up on from the ALPSP alert... some good points worthy of consideration.

the ALPSP take on it is...
'Scholarly writing traditionally conforms to certain journalistic principles – which Nielsen has promoted as the ‘inverted pyramid’ – use of abstracts/summaries for long content, subheadings – so far so good – as well as the use of short paragraphs, bulleted lists and hypertext. Despite the availability of faster internet connections, enabling ‘rich’ media (used increasingly as supplementary materials in scholarly and professional publishing) can become ‘poor’ media because such audio or visual materials are linear and difficult to search. Publishers need to be as concerned about readability on the screen as they are about readability on the page – line lengths, breaking up solid text and the like. Many scholarly and professional publishers use the same format for the screen as for the print, a practice which hopefully will not last for long.'

this is certainly a good area for debate - and what eventually does make for good science writing? i'd suppose that what we have to address as publishers is what content is most important to the reader and when (i.e. what needs to be seen first and fast), what needs to be updatable (reference lists, links, author contact info?, etc.), and how we manage the process of getting this data online and archived consistently and in a reusable form.

i like the NLM XML standard - i think it's a godsend. there is enough freedom with XML (pretty much infinite if i 'get' the concept behind XML) plus there are enough elements and attributes to cover our needs as 'capturers' of valuable information. and i think that here's where an interesting branch-off appears. maybe our role is not to push and push on how we present this information - we're doing a pretty good job of that already - or the speed at which we publish - we're doing ok there too - but how we really add value... and i think that is going to be either hosting the data too (as 'electronic supplementary material', as we do now (rudimentarily), or finding an efficient/workable way to link to data repositories (however they will take form).

looks like i've shifted my perspective as i've written here. but i suppose i think that our authors (mine anyway) are already doing a pretty good job of breaking up their written content into usable, web-useful chunks. it's how we make their information 'dance' that i think requires further focus...

supermarket2.0

take this link... supermarket 2.0

very funny israeli video on a 2.0-compliant supermarket...

just started...

Suite Francaise (Irene Nemirovsky) today...

LibraryThing

been adding books like crazy to LibraryThing this lunchtime... it's rediculously addictive! especially when you (i) realize you (i) can't remember even my favorite books - and that's just the thing, because i can remember that there are books i know i respect beyond respect, but can i remember what they are when i ask myself...

this morning's journey to work...

forgot to pick up my book ('Frankie and Stankie' - nearly finished; and it's just got better and better - she's a great writer...) as i sneaked out this morning, so it was on with the ipod, which is currently a bit out of date ith the music i've recently bought. i fell back on two favorites - and thought i'd mention here (in a beef-out-my-profile way) they're greatness... U2's War and Nivana's Nevermind are classics it's clear - and War is rapidly becoming my favorite album... i simply can't find anything i don't like about it, apart from having heard New Years Day a few too many times in my life.

Royal Society Digital Archive visualization

Seems like someone has taken our archive and transformed the data into a number of interesting visualizations: author and word distributions and a combination of these. Leads to some interesting features, but most of all gives one a different perspective on this huge archive.

I wasn't aware of this pet-project until now, but it appeared online on 1 December 2006. And was promoted through information aestethics on 1 February 2007. If you're reading this (and from my profile, I can be pretty certain no one is!) and have a perspective, I'd be interested to hear it.

final version of web 2.0 video...

this is apparently the final version of the web2.0 vid i posted back in feb ... is there much difference?

and this was the vid the first version was in response to...

i noticed bob ducharme as blogged on this too...

connotea

while i'm praising nature, why not carry on and give them their dues for another (already proven massively successful) advancement...

me: http://www.connotea.org/user/matthewll

nature network

i think this is a really good start down a road we will all travel to keep our audience...

me: http://network.nature.com/profile/U2BB0F395

don't miss Carter

don't miss 'Carter beat the devil' by Glen David Gold. it's surely one of the most enjoyable reads i've had in a fair while. i'm a sucker for historical fiction, and this is a really fine example of taking the historical thread and weaving a great story - so well told - around it.

now moved on to Barbara Trapido's 'Frankie and Stankie', which is somewhat of a slow burner; but now i'm into it, it's getting better and better. the history of South Africa's there for the taking, but cleverly intertwined with a child's perspective and how it affects her. still reading...

Publishing 2.0 conference on 25 April 2007

this looks a must for anyone in my line of business... and even though it's still just me reading my blog, it doesn't hurt me linking to it.

excellent video on the future of education and the web

running away from me

really can't believe how quickly this thing runs away from me... over a week since i last wrote anything... and even now too busy to get anythign down... especially anything interesting... to me or anyone else

keeping up...

it's pretty hard to keep up with everything, i'm finding... especially when your kids are obviously colluding to keep you awake practically all night every night... our two-year-old, who never stirs, was up nearly the whole night last night... it was a laugh a minute, i can tell you. i've also got a nasty cold that is manifesting itself in one big hacking cough and constantly blocked sinuses. adding to the joy of being alive.

the office is moving from 'still' to 'stone cold silence'. even pins being dropped has been banned. there's the ubiqituous key-tapping hum - maybe that'll be the tinnitus of the future.

it was valentines yesterday, and we exchanged cards. poll out-classed me by making hers. but both of us failed to get the heart-felt message written - but i guess recognizing that is pretty much the same as having written it in the first place. we cooked together - poll made a chorizo and butter bean bake and i made pudding - aunt sally, a 'deconstructed apple charlotte', the recipe said. our oven is basically a nuclear installation in disguise, so when i checked it ten minutes early it was obviously burnt across the top, and looking like it had self-deconstructed in the cooking process... tasted alright with enough cream though.

moved on to Louis Sachar's 'Holes' now. finished 'The Vesusius Club' about a week ago. it was ok - a simply entwined Edwardian adventure tale. i thought it might develop the humour, but it stayed at pretty much the same level it reached from the first few pages. i've actually just finished 'Holes' today. it was a quick, kids-book read - along the same lines as Paul Coehlo's 'The Alchemist', but more down-to-earth and readable. i actually thought it might be going along the same lines as Magnus Mills' 'The Restraint of Beasts' initially, but no.

football, rugby, friends and beer...

spent yesterday rushing around, getting up to Cambridge (ticket debacle at Kings Cross that i'm not going to get into again...) and back, down to home to help with the kids briefly, then back to Kennington to play footie and eventually sit back in the pub and - as it turns out - not watch the England friendly against Spain. [Seems like that was no great loss in the visual pleasure department.] Sat in the pub, i found out one of the new faces there was a writer for a rugby mag and had covered welsh rugby over the last year... couldn't help but to get into a discussion about the six nations and the fate of the endglish and welsh teams... he's an england supporter and me for wales... so a fair few differences of opinion, but he'd lived in cardiff a while and offered up the opportunity of some touch sevens rugby in the summer, which might be nice...

was directed to this... go2web20 a day or two ago, very impressive... and bloody handy.

been struggling today, as i was out monday night then out last night - and at 34, i'm no spring chicken. pretty much ready for bed as soon as i got up. with the snowfall today, though, it was always going to be fun seeing my daughter's face when she looked out the window after getting up...

kinda run out of things to write - even though i know i had some more to get down when i started today's entry. i was thinking - blogs are just basically online open diaries, right? it's funny to think people used to lock their diaries up and hide them away - and now we publish them happily to an audience of millions - or in my case, just to me, still... so maybe not that different after all...

web 2.0 video worth watching...

back to it...

so i spent the weekend mostly away from the computer, apart from a quick check on sunday morning - which is good for me, and i guess good for the kids too. it means i spend less time sat at the screen and more time with them. took no. 1 swimming on sunday morning - she's pretty good at making it clear she has no fear whatsoever, launching herself off the side at any opportunity; and no. 2 has learnt to get himself across the floor without anyone watching. we think it's a combination of rolling and twisting, but neither of us have actually caught him in the act yet. you just find him somewhere new each time you turn around.

we're beta testing our new content website today for the first time: there'll be quite a bit of feedback before we're on the money.

noticed the RSC's Project Prospect this morning - rather nice solution to a problem I think we're all having.

also been google alerting myself to see whether these blogs are getting picked up... and it's all rather sluggish, to say the least.

big thinking at the weekend - admittedly it was my mind wandering while i watched top gear last night, but all the same. been considering what's important when it all comes down to it... seems like a little bit of personal finance instruction and some basic car mechanics might have stood me in much better stead than my two degrees in earth sciences have done. i guess the piece-of-paper factor is important in the long run, but all the same there's a fair few of life's practicalities i fall short on. then again, i guess if i took a bit more interest in those things i'd be on track a little better.

but when you think about your own kids' education, and what they've got in store - all this testing at seven and get-your-kids-in-the-right-school-or-your-life's-over stuff - is just a knock on from the baby olympics we're in right now... the fact that your kid doesn't reach his or her milestones for their age or whatever cannot have ever counted for more. where are we going with all this stuff? what does it all mean? i can't keep up and i can't really get too moved by it either...

3am eternal...

far from the reality of today's life where '3am eternal' describes more accurately the length of time my son seems to scream for in the middle of the night, my mate found some excellent youtube moments for us to relive our late youth...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxbP-4flNYA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWMIXgCaJPQ
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=80D396A30395C74C

anyway - they've gotta bring a smile to any sad mid-thirty someone like me-o...

another day...

another bother. more glum faces on the desk's around me. cheer up, eh.

but i've started a new book: "The Vesuvius Club", by Mark Gatiss, from The League of Gentleman. looks good. reads well. to page 8, that is.

can't see much on the tech horizon but for the launch of tediously uneventful Vista (got it here at work a couple of days ago and it's no great shakes - apart from a load more packaged Windows software and a flashy if ineffective interface) and the disappointment of a dead connection between this blog and Picasa's Hello: 'bloggerbotisdead' is not too great a welcome. pointed to snapdrive and hopefully get some results there.

glad i've got this now...

i thought i'd put things into context as far as my own web presence goes... this was me:
The Royal Society Digital Archive now registered in CrossRef (knowledgespeak)
this was a straight follow-up to our getting the archive content online in september.
this is the real thing by the way...
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/archive

the thought was that i could use this blog to trace back through what i get up to. but the more you think about how these things work, the more you realize you are doing it for an unknown community as well as yourself. even if that community never comes to see it. [highly likely in this case i'll be guessing.]

what i was thinking was that i should split the whole thing up into the separate facets of my life - something like work, home and interests... but it's probably the case that there's a fair degree of overlap there. i'll try to do it first off, then drop it as soon as it appears it's not going to work... which i can't believe will take long.

as an aside on the work-vs-home front (he said, breaking his rule straight away), it looks like i can drop a day (or two halves) in the office and by doing so reduce the amount of time our kids have to spend away from us from three days to two. which can only be a good thing. from a lot of aspects when i come to think of it. it's mostly driven by our complete lack of ability to pay for so much childcare, but it works out that we both get to see them more - and they don't have to feel like they're dumped off with strangers (i know it's not that bad) all the time. anyway - it looks like it'll work. we'll see.

one final thought: had while i was crushed in the train on the way to work this morning... it was of a quotation i read last night about the british, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau...
"The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it."
i guess i thought of it because i'd just paid for my new annual travel pass last week and am still sour at the £100 rise. we wait for the train to be late pretty much every morning, or even cancelled if there's a hint of bad weather, crowd onto the carriages, avoid eye contact for as long as the journey takes with the ever-present delays and groan at the driver's apologetic announcements. and yet we pay gladly for our tickets to suffer the same again tomorrow morning and every morning of our working lives. that'll be another thing i'll get out of if the home-working comes off.

my first entry

so i've set this thing up, and now I need to start getting interesting...

i've basically started it to make a record of my life (as I see it).

my memory has failed: i thought i couldn't remember a thing. but it appears i can, if only i talk about it. maybe this will give me another way to remember. they're mostly good - even great - memories, so it's all worth doing.