Web 2.0: What Can It Offer the Research Community?

Web 2.0: What Can It Offer the Research Community? by Brian Kelly | Feb 27, 2007 | Events | 16 comments Web 2.0: What Can It Offer the Research Community? is the title of a talk I’m giving at on Wednesday 7 th March 2007. Normally I might make an announcement about the availability of a presentation after the event. However I’m increasingly realising the advantages of getting others involved in the early stages of prepearing talks. In this case I have made my slides available on Slideshare prior to the event – and have been pleased to discover that the slides have been marked as a favourite by two Slideshare users ( digicmb and jensjepper ). This has been useful as, as one might expect, these two users both have slideshows on related themes which are of interest to me. But what do you think Web 2.0 can offer the research community? Since the Web was developed for the particle physics research community and, as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out , Web 2.0 is simply a marketing term for his original vision of a collaborative and highly interactive environment, surely the particle physics research community will welcome the potential provided by Web 2.0? On the other hand, perhaps, as PPARC is a government-funded organisation, the organisational culture may be conservative, with the emphasis of PPARC’s Web site having an attractive and usable interface to quality content will corresponding quality assurance and workflow processes which ensure that organisational and government guidelines are strictly adhered to. In which case, Web 2.0 might be regarded as primarily a trivial social networking environment which might have to be tolerated in universities, but has nothing to offer the research community. What is your view on what Web 2.0 can offer the research community? And do you have any examples which I can use? 16 Comments Keith Doyle on February 27, 2007 at 11:58 am The researchers I have talked to like Blogs for reasons other than social networking. Researchers observe a traditional methodology. However, blogs allow a more creative freeflow ability to put down ideas as they appear in the consciousness. The aim is creativity, rather than social networking, comments and kudos. A popular platform for educational social networking is elgg.net. For example, see elgg.net/holla/weblog .

P.S. A few readers have asked which website builder / no-code we actually reach for — it's Squarespace; take a look here if you want the current details.