A Twitter view of the general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology - #asmgm

The above image is a word cloud generated from about 1200 tweets (that is, messages posted on the microblogging service Twitter). All these tweets are related to the general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which was recently held in San Diego, California (May 23-27).

Please wait for my next blog post, where I'm going to tell you about a few things that could be learnt about microbes by following the ASM meeting on the internet -- no matter your physical location on Earth (and beyond?). Also, I'm going to explain how I made the word cloud -- I'm pretty sure there must be a better and easier way to do this, so I would certainly appreciate your feedback on my next post.

Note: unfortunately, the tags in the cloud are not hyperlinked. The image was generated using Wordle.

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Social media for microbiology education and research

Vincent Racaniello is a well-known Professor of Microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center, New York. As a complement to his research and his classes on virology, he successfully uses different social media tools (blogging, podcasting, microblogging) to spread the love for viruses -- I mean, to teach the public about viruses (the kind that make you sick... or not).

The following video is a recording of a great talk he gave at the Spring 2010 meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Edinburgh, UK. In this presentation he explains -- in simple terms -- how he uses blogging, podcasting, and other social media tools for the popularization of virology.

I'm wondering if the talk could convince a few of the microbiologists in the audience to jump on the social media bandwagon...? Anyone?


The video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and can be watched also at BioCrowd or at Virology Blog.


Image credits: "Jump on the social media bandwagon" by Matt Hamm. Source: Flickr. Image used under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons license.

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Social media for scientists

The following slidecast (that is, a slideshow including audio) is an excellent presentation by Mary Canady and William Gunn on social media for scientists. Topics covered: LinkedIn, Twitter, social bookmarking (delicious, citeulike, Mendeley), FriendFeed, science blogs.

If you are a scientist and you think social media is completely useless for you as a researcher... well, you are wrong and must watch this!

Social Media for Scientists

View more OpenOffice presentations from Mary Canady.

(Found via Twitter)

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Microbiology on Twitter?

Just for fun, I searched Twitter using some microbial-related terms (not many, as the query cannot be more than 140 characters long!). I have added an RSS feed for this query to the side bar on this blog.

[Note (added on 15th Nov): I removed the RSS feed from the side bar -- the automated search was not very useful]

Is Twitter useful for scientists or for science educators? For some, it seems to be.

Will Twitter (or a similar tool) be of general use among scientists in a near future? Perhaps.

As a new user, I know very little about Twitter. But interesting things are happening there.

I just find difficult to make sense out of most of them...

But I´ll keep trying.

And you should, too.

On Twitter, I am TwistedBacteria (obvious). But, definitely, you should be following at least MicroBytes and MicrobeWorld.

I also created a Twibe (a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic) called Microbiology.

(Thanks so much to Alan Cann for introducing me to the Twitter universe!)

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A new web 2.0 for scientists

From a post at Science Blog:

"Scientists from Harvard and some other universities from different countries started a project, in which they try to establish a web 2.0 application for scientists. This platform would facilitate the communication between researchers and would increase the efficacy of the research work."

Learn more at Facebook for researchers: www.researchgate.com

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Congratulations! It's a Scintilla!

The guys at Nature Publishing Group are trying hard to build "the definitive" Web 2.0 for scientists: Connotea (online reference management service), Nature Network (online meeting place for scientists), and now Scintilla.

Scintilla is an aggregator of science weblogs, news stories and publication databases, with two remarkable features. First, sources are manually selected to be related only to science. And second, you can rate and recommend stories to other people (which can be organized in groups according to their interests, for instance microbiology). Some comments are available on Nascent, bbgm and MicrobiologyBytes.

(Twisted note no. 1) Nature Network (network.nature.com) is not the same as Nature Network (www.naturenetwork.net [live imagery and sound from cameras set up in Nature throughout the world]), which is also different to Nature Network (www.naturenetwork.org [platform to help developing countries for economic development and environmental protection]).

(Twisted note no. 2) Please don't confuse Scintilla (scintilla.nature.com) with Scintilla (www.scintilla.com [jewelry]), or even with Scintilla (www.scintilla.org [free source code editing component]). OK?

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