I’m not a scienceinformaticist, nor do I play one on TV, but I did come across a few interesting uses of wikis and blogs that might be intriguing for bioinformatics and cheminformatics people in the Planet Info community.
UsefulChem Project
This open source science project deals with chemical solutions. The UsefulChem Wiki is attempting to organize the recent and relevant information from that community’s blog. The blog activity has taken a hit, apparently, as attention focused on the new wiki. This is the part I like: “Experimental details are recorded in the Experiments Blog and summarized on a contents page.” I’ve thought for a while that the best role of a wiki in an integrated forum would be as a tool for summarization, thus helping new user discovery without requiring lots of plodding through endless posts of an established online discussion.
Amateur Bioinformatics
This wiki is for amateur scientists — “someone who wants to dedicate some time to answering serious biology questions.” The creator gives an explanation why this site is necessary.
Biological Informatics
There are a lot of useful links on this resource page, at least for bioinformaticists. This site is part of the Virtual Private Library, a bunch of automated bots continuously searching and updating various subjects listed in their ontology tree. It focuses on blogs, wikis, listservs and news aggregators. The Biological Informatics site lists Internet resources for biological informatics (health informatics, neuroinformatics, biodiversity informatics and biomolecular informatics).
