Definately not a first post, but here are my experiences of my first blogging conference\n(see also this \nand this ,\nthe latter using semantic markup for the event): it was fun! My suggested unconference was not chosen, because I, as I usually do,\nfocus to much on how instead of why one wants to do something. Nevertheless, I got to say my things, so I won’t complain. While I\nhave not noted a vivid live coverage in blogosphere of the conference, several people were\nlive covering the meeting \non FriendFeed . Really nice, because you can comment on statements the speaker makes, while he is talking.\nPeople have been using the sciblog tag, which should give you enough hits in the various aggregators and social sites.
\n\nThe main thing I liked about this conference was the chance to meet fellow bloggers. I am not so much interested in why others blog,\nand generally not reading blogs about the scientific life. I have written up in the past why I blog, so read\nthat .\nWhat does interest me is how we can enhance blogs to make them\neasier to aggregate, search through, retrieve data, etc, etc. What I’d like to be able to do is read a blog item, note that it is\nabout topic I like, go of into Taverna or Bioclipse (possible via\nUbiquity), and hit the get me that data blob button.\nNow, I don’t mind it being hidden behind a paper, being on Google Data, or whatever, I just want to simply hit that button.
\n\nReturning readers of this blog that semantic chemistry is something I have worked on in the past, but while\nChemical blogspace has a nice\npeople-blogged-about-this-molecule \nsection, it has not really picked up. Main reason is, that people cannot or do not want to add semantic markup. Now, the one thing\nI like most of the conference discussions yesterday (the pub was too noisy for me to reasonably chat with anyone), was the proposal\nto use Ubiquity for adding these semantics. So, commands like addSechemticMarkup, convertSMILESIntoInChIKey, that sort of\nthings… The cool thing here, is that it is blogging service independent. It works for anything inside Firefox, including\nwikis, email, knols, whatever. Now, one obstacle is that Ubiquity involves a command line; and we know how much people dislike\ncommand lines, but I’m sure they will come up with Guiquity. Actually, maybe this is the\nactivities that Mike has been talking about…