We’ve updated our Social Media section with information about BioCrowd!  Check it out here:  http://iambiotech.org/social-media/

What exactly is BIL:PIL, you ask?

BIL:PIL is an unconference that will bring together over 200 entrepreneurs, health professionals, technologists and laypeople to discuss the future of healthcare.

I Am Biotech will be sponsoring the event and hosting a “blogger tent” where attendees can relax, blog/tweet the conference, and continue the dialogue about healthcare innovation with those who are unable to attend.

Even if you don’t make it to San Diego this weekend, you can still join the discussion. In addition to following the conference on twitter with #bilpil, you can also watch a live stream of the speakers online.

The live stream – which you can find on http://bilpil.com – will be up this Friday and Saturday from 9am – 4pm PST, broadcasting talks from a great line-up of speakers including: Dr. Stephen Friend, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Val Jones, Joe Trippi, and many more.

P.S. A HUGE shout out to Jonathan Sheffi, BIL:PIL organizer extraordinaire, who is also a member of IAmBiotech’s Advisory Board.

Phil Baumann just posted a great presentation called “Priming Healthcare for Twitter”, which he gave at the National Association of Medical Communicators this week.

It can be a bit tough to follow slidecasts without audio, but it’s still a good intro for healthcare folks new to the platform.

Check it out:

Epernicus is a social networking site developed solely for the working scientist. In place of your favorite music & books, you can list your present and past research advisors, projects you’re working on, and even post full-text PDFs of publications you’ve authored. Based on our experience, you’ll be better off searching for articles in a normal database, but their community tools might just be worth giving Epernicus a try. Because it’s a much narrower group than you’ll find on similar professional networking sites like LinkedIn, you may be more likely to find people with the niche expertise you are looking for.

In fact, that’s exactly why the founders of Epernicus started up the site. In an aptly titled post “Why should you join Epernicus if you’re on LinkedIn?“, they write:

Mikhail and I started Epernicus because we realized that the social networks to which we belonged weren’t able to serve our needs as scientists. The profiles didn’t capture what was important to scientists. And equally as important, we couldn’t use these networks to help us find expertise in real world scientific networks.

For example, I have hundreds of contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn. But neither site can help me find a person in my department who has who expertise with dynamic light scattering or siRNA delivery. This is why we built Epernicus.

Just how do you find these people? Their “Find an Expert” tool allows you to search people by keywords. However, there is no advanced search, so it tends to turn up some people who aren’t particularly relevant to your field. We’re hoping they fine tune this soon to make it easier for people to link up and collaborate.

The service also supports the creation of groups, similar to Facebook or LinkedIn groups, focused on whatever you would like. There’s a group for people who study zebrafish and one for people who’ve received NSF fellowships. However, since the site is just getting started, you might have to take the initiative to start your own if you don’t find what you’re looking for. We did a quick search for “biotech” and only turned up one group (vs. LinkedIn’s 524).

Similar to Facebook or Twitter, you can also post your “status” to broadcast what you are working on.

One unique feature is what the site calls the ‘BenchQ’. You can pose a question that will be visible either to everyone who uses the site, or just to people in your chosen field. Questions others have posed range from the very technical (on the surface enhanced Raman scattering of pyridine) to the philosophical (“Is pursuit of health an inalienable right?).

OUR CONCLUSION: You might find that Epernicus helps you connect better to others in your field, but you also might find that everything Epernicus does, another site (like Mendeley or LinkedIn) already does better. As they continue to build more functionality and more people join and create groups, this may change. For now, you’ll probably find yourself opting for LinkedIn more often than not.

To learn more before taking the plunge and joining yet another social network, check out their short introductory video:

P.S. We still haven’t tried out their customizable tool “epernicus: solutions”, which purports to offer “private expertise finding and networking solutions for research institutions in industry and academia. Based on the unique Epernicus platform and tailored to your organization’s structure and needs, Epernicus Solutions can help your researchers communicate and collaborate more effectively across groups, departments and locations.”

If your company or organization uses this toolset and you’d be interested in writing a review, please get in touch. We’d love to hear your perspective.

Review by Wren Elhai

Mendeley wants to do it all—it organizes your electronic articles and citations, makes writing a works cited or a list of references a snap, and lets you easily share your work with colleagues across the hall or around the world. It elegantly integrates a desktop program, browser and word processor plugins, and an online networking site.

Why is Mendeley useful? You probably have a folder full of PDFs you’ve collected from various online sites, planning to read and use at some point in the future. However, it’s often hard to find the one article you need in the clutter of your computer’s hard drive. Mendeley solves this problem with its stand-alone program, Mendeley Desktop. Just add all your PDF files to your library and Mendeley will extract (with pretty good success rates) the author, title, journal, and year of publication for each one. You can then use the program as a sort of iTunes for your documents.

Instantly search the full text of your library for a word, author, or journal. Make collections to group articles that deal with the same subject, including citations or abstracts for articles you don’t have electronic versions of. When you find what you’re looking for, you can read and annotate PDFs right in the Mendeley window.

Mendeley recognizes data from a wide variety of online article databases (including PubMed, ScienceDirect, and JSTOR). Once you’ve set up the Mendeley browser plugin (aka the Mendeley ‘bookmarklet’), you can just click a button in your browser to capture a citation and abstract for the article you’re viewing on your screen. In many cases, you’ll even be able to download a full text PDF, right from your Mendeley window. Or, tell Mendeley to watch a certain folder, and it will automatically add PDFs you download and even refile them by author or journal. If you keep your articles organized in Mendeley as you read them, exporting a properly formatted list of references to Word becomes an easy, two-step process.

You could just use the article organizing capabilities of Mendeley without ever touching the social media features. However, they’re actually worth using, and are intelligently designed to promote easy collaboration and broader dissemination of new research. On the Mendeley webpage, you can create a profile, share your biographical information, and load all of your published articles and book chapters as publically accessible PDFs. The search function makes it easy to find others who are working on similar topics and download their work, direct from the source.

Once you have a group of colleagues who all use Mendeley, you can share a collection of articles, allowing up to 10 people to access your full-text PDFs. At the very least, this allows you to quickly access articles you read frequently, even if you’re not at your work computer. Just load them into your account, and you can download them just by logging into your Mendeley account online.

Mendeley is still in Beta testing, which means it is sometimes a bit cranky and can crash unexpectedly. However, as the bugs are ironed out, it promises to be a very useful piece of software.

For more useful tips on the social media tools that will make your professional life easier, check out our Social Media Resource Center.

This last Saturday, tech-savvy scientists gathered at the Science Online London conference at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The conference, which was called the Online Blogging conference last year, was renamed to better encapsulate the broader impact of emerging technologies on science and the scientific community.

This conference also follows the 3rd annual ScienceOnline conference which took place in North Carolina in January with a similar focus. A great comparison of the two events can be found at Katherine Haxton’s blog Endless Possibilities. The conference was a one-day event that was heavily live-blogged by attendees on Twitter and at the FriendFeed group.

One of the presentations that impressed attendees the most was the live demonstration of Google Wave. According to Biochemist Cameron Neylon, one of the few scientists who have been given pre-release access to the new platform, Google Wave has the potential to transform the way that scientific research is conducted and how papers are written.

The real-time authoring and date-stamped recording of contributions also makes for an obvious way to create papers that aren’t static, that are updated over time, perhaps in combination with one or many frozen versions of record.

You can read Neylon’s full interview with Nature about the potential impact of Google Wave on the scientific community here.

One of the added bonuses of the tech-savvy conference was that interested individuals who could not make it in the flesh had the opportunity to attend in Second Life for 10 GBP/15 USD. Almost all the presentations were video broadcast in real-time. In a session titled “Blogging for Impact”, Dave Munger and Daniel MacAurthur outlined how to blog effectively as well as the potential benefits that blogging holds for scientists. Dave Munger even made his presentation to attendees via Second Life. Here are some of the benefits he touched on:

1. You can use it as a research or writing tool. You get the opportunity at a dry run for papers, for instance.
2. You can tell a much longer story, and you can really engage with your readers and start building a dialogue with them.
3. You can control your own message – no-one is telling you what you have to write or how you have to write it.
4. Build stronger connections with colleagues.

With a number of bloggers in the audience, many of the sessions were captured almost verbatim and posted online. You can read notes from the rest of the sessions at the blog the mind wobbles.

You can also find a full rundown of posts that have gone up about Science Online London 2009 at Martin Fenner’s blog Gobbledygook.

I came across this recent discussion at the Commonwealth Club of California. A panel featuring Jimmy Wales (Wikimedia), Stephen Friend (Sage), and John Wilbanks (Science Commons) discussed the idea of bringing Web efficiencies to scientific research. It was moderated by Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media.

Making the Web Work for Science – Full from Jordan Mendelson on Vimeo.

Genome Alberta recently launched what is quickly becoming my favorite Facebook app of the year (and not just because it features a feed from IAmBiotech!).

The app – called GenOmics – is a place for people interested in genetics to post stories, blog about their own experiences or research, ask questions, and find information.

We recently interviewed Mike Spear from Genome Alberta about how and why they created the app.

Q. I heard a rumor about a previous “give a gene” app that this was based on. What’s the history there?

A. As a not-for-profit genetic research organization we don’t have a huge budget to spend on communications, but still have a strong outreach and education mandate and I was searching for ways to meet that mandate in a cost efficient manner. I was attending a social media conference in late 2007, and over a few drinks one evening someone said too bad you can’t give away genes. Well after a few more drinks and more ideas, I decided we could in fact give away virtual genes. I hunted down a good Facebook developer in Seattle and we put together a virtual team – I still have never met them in person – and the application to give away genes was born. We had 24 virtual genes for users to choose from including the gene for blue eyes, red hair, the one that helps you run faster, and even one for your dog which helps determine whether it is going to be large or small. We fell short of our target number of genes to give away but did well enough to consider the initial application a success and learned a lot from it.

Q. Why did you decide to create the GenOmics app?

A. Our original send-a-gene application was not functioning terribly well with the changes that Facebook made to their interface over the last year. That left us with the choice of either spending some money to update the application or abandon it completely. After looking at the options we decided that we needed to do more than a simple upgrade and that it should be more interactive and wide ranging than it had been. At the same time our developer, Jeff Reifman of Newscloud, had created a Facebook application platform that was ideally suited to where we were headed. Genetics, and biotechnology in general, change as rapidly as social media and keeping up is tough. By turning the application into a news aggregator we thought it could be a ‘one stop genomics shop’ that was also fun and had a social media community aspect.

Q. Why GenOmics?

A. We’ll start with a heavy concentration on genomics but eventually would like to cover many of the other ‘omics’ such at metagenomics, nutrigenomics, and metabolomics. It is also a play on the idea of Gen X or Y because we think these omic sciences are going to be the some of the most influential in the biotechnology field and that we’re all part of the Omics Generation.

The original application was called genomics and by playing with the name a bit we could keep the same Facebook location of apps.facebook.com/genomics

Q. Who do you hope will use the GenOmics app?

A. Everyone. I think students and teachers can make great use of it but people from industry and researchers will find it a handy way to check news in one spot and to post their own news and stories. If we can keep up on the news and the community contributes their own thoughts you really won’t have to go anywhere else to get news about genomics – or some of the other ‘omics’.

Q. I’ve started using it to post stories I come across so that other users can check them out. And other users’ posts have been great fodder for IAmBiotech. Tell us about some of the other fun features.

A. Well there is still a tab for sending a gene and we still have the original 24 genes and will add some more down the road. You can check out the raw feeds from sources such a I Am Biotech, New Scientist, our own Genome Alberta blog, and several other feeds. We can currently handle 10 incoming feeds at a time and will change them around on a regular basis to keep the content fresh. As you read stories you can vote them up or comment on them and in the process earn points for prizes starting in September. There is also a tab to suggest ideas or find answers to questions.

Users can post stories from elsewhere on the web by simply going to the ‘Post a Story’ button and pasting in the url for the story. Depending on the source layout, the GenOmics application will add in pictures, headlines, and summary automatically. Also in the same section as ‘Post a Story’ is an option to ‘Post a Blog’ which is really just the opportunity to write your own story.

The application has a lot of features already and we have some ideas for adding more.

Q. I hear you’ll be featuring the GenOmics app at the upcoming World Skills Competition in Calgary. What are you planning to do there?

A. World Skills is a huge event with 150,000 people from 51 countries expected to attend including 52,000 grades 9 and 10 Alberta students being brought through on school trips. Even though plans for World Skills have been underway for a couple of years we received a late invitation to display the portable CAVEman we had at BIO Atlanta. With so many people coming through, we thought it an ideal venue to officially launch the application which has been out in beta for a few weeks now. We have lots of giveaways for the teens with the url ( facebook.genomealberta.ca ) printed on it and we’ll be recording video clips of people attending and adding them to the site. We’ll be asking kids what they see as a future occupation (World Skills is all about careers and skills ) and ask adults what they think about their own jobs in the 21st century economy. We’ll also be working with the Science Alberta Foundation on some on-site activities to generate interest in science as a career choice but with an emphasis on the skills areas such a lab technician, bioinformatics, or even project management.

If you aren’t in Calgary at World Skills you’ll be able to post similarly themed videos to the application, link to a YouTube video, or embed a video link in the blog section and be eligible for prizes as well.