The conference was initially conceived as an opportunity for local North Carolina scientists, bloggers and teachers to meet and discuss how the online world can be used for furthering the aims of science communication and education. But the world did not allow us to keep it small and local – participants arrived from all over the USA and abroad and the sessions covered many other aspects of the use of Web in science. Over the past three years, the conference grew in size and strength, with session leaders and participants coming from all corners of the USA, from Canada, the UK, Sweden, Finland, Serbia, Italy, Germany, South Africa and Brazil. The early behind-the-scenes communications indicate that next year we may have people coming from New Zealand, Antarctica and even outer space!

Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, teachers, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers, elected officials, university administrators, enterpreneurs and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science.

Understandably, some of the issues dear to PLoS such as Open Access publishing, scientific metrics, and Web 2.0 approaches to networking and information-sharing, have been front and center at our conferences. Thus, unsurprisingly, PLoS has been involved in helping or sponsoring the event every year. Apart from myself, as well as several members of the PLoS ONE editorial board, participants in the conference in the past included Liz Allen (Director of Marketing and Communications – see an interview about her experience), former managing editor of PLoS Biology Hemai Parthasarathy and PLoS ONE managing editor Peter Binfield. We expect a continued involvement and we hope that other members of PLoS community – editorial board members, authors and readers – will also consider attending this exciting and edifying meeting.

So, please join us for this three-day event to explore science on the Web. To get a better understanding of the conference, please check out the blog and media coverage of the 2007 conference. See what we did at the 2008 conference and check the blog and media coverage. Look around the ScienceOnline’09 wiki and the blog and media coverage of the 2009 meeting. Interviews with a number of participants at the 2008 conference are here and with participants of the 2009 conference here.

• Please take a minute to register (if you were registered last year, use that password) for the wiki.
• Log in and add ideas for the program at this page.
• The registration for the conference itself will open in late Fall 2009. Sign up here to receive advance notice about registration and other conference updates. (Note: Conference registration is not the same as member registration for editing this wiki, or vice versa – they are two different platforms. To contribute your ideas to this planning wiki, please go to the blue strip on the top of the wiki page and register.)
• If you or your organization are interested in becoming a Sponsor, or helping in other ways, please contact us at info@scienceonline2010.com
• Keep informed about the organization of the conference at the News and Updates page.
• Keep up with the blog and media coverage here.
• This is a collaborative and community conference — we need you to participate now to help us make this a successful, fun and educational event. Please volunteer to help.
• This is a conference to explore new ways in communicating scientific exploration. Our conference addresses a variety of issues and perspectives on science communication, including science literacy, the popularization of science, science in classrooms and in homes, debunking pseudoscience, using blogs as tools for presenting scientific research, writing about science, health and medicine and even using the Web to conduct research. In addition to being an internationally known hub of scientific and biomedical research and education, North Carolina has numerous science blogs written by a wide variety of people – see this listing of Science bloggers located in North Carolina.
• If twittering, use the hashtag: #scio10 (use the same tag on other services, e.g., Flickr, YouTube, etc.). Many sessions will also be livestreamed and/or recorded for virtual participation.
• Join the conversation in the FriendFeed room.
• Join the Facebook event (this helps us with estimating the number and composition of potential participants)
• Help us spread the word: in person, by phone or e-mail, on social networks and on blogs and websites. If online, please use our Promo materials.

Despite online debates – which one is better: Twitter or FriendFeed, sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek – the fact is that these are two different ‘animals’ altogether. Asking one to make a choice between the two is like asking one to make a choice between e-mail and YouTube – those are two different services that do different things. Thus, they are to be used differently. And we at PLoS are aware of this and use both of these services in what we think are appropriate ways.

Twitter

Twitter is a communications tool (or a ‘human application’). You can broadcast (one-to-many), you can eavesdrop (many-to-one) or you can converse (one-to-one, either in public or through Direct Messages). But most importantly – you have to mix a little bit of all three. If all you do is throw your RSS feed into Twitter, i.e., only broadcast, then you are doing it wrong. In Twitter, you have to engage with others on a regular basis – listening, talking, conversing. Reciprocating. Not building a fan-club, but a network of friends. As I mentioned on my blog before:

You will be measured by the size of your network – who is your (mutual – it has to be mutual!) friend.

As they say, if all you get on Twitter is uninteresting chatter, you are following the wrong people. For instance, you may be interested in following scientists or science writers on Twitter, for a healthy daily dose of science-related news and discussion.

Smart people on Twitter have moved away from ‘Lifecasting’ (i.e., “what I had for breakfast”) and have started doing Mindcasting instead (Jay Rosen explains the concept). By tweeting a series of messages and links over a short period of time, one can collect on Twitter (and import into FriendFeed for additional commentary) all the material for a serious blog post in one place. For example, Jay Rosen has collected a series of good links about the future of journalism on Twitter, which resulted in a subsequent blog post.

Twitter is also becoming a platform for breaking news. It can be also put into the service of medical education, e.g., liveblogging surgery, or in scientific research – for example, in monitoring fish catch by non-commercial fishermen.

I myself, after a long time of resistance, recently succumbed and started using Twitter – find me here. I find it useful and I am trying to balance the three modes (broadcast, eavesdrop, converse) as best I can. I can definitely see the allure, especially for people who use mobile devices (I don’t – I spend too much time online anyway and need to reconnect with the physicalness of the world when I am not at the computer, thus I disabled the online access on my cell phone and have never texted a message in my life).

People who follow me on Twitter, probably all of them, know where I work. One out of 20 tweets or so have something to do with PLoS. My profile links to my blog, on which it is immediately obvious where I work. I don’t need to pull in the RSS feed from PLoS to be effective as a “face of PLoS” on Twitter.

But, even better, I am not alone – Liz Allen is now on Twitter, too, as an “official” face of PLoS. And, if you check out the PLoS twitter profile and click on “Follow”, you will see that she totally groks it. She tweets our science stories as they break particularly for the benefit of science journalists who follow PLoS on Twitter and others who love to get the latest information hot off the press.  Her tweets do not have that horrible “PR feel” about them that some of the business marketers erroneously use. So I hope you will subscribe.

There are other PLoS folks on Twitter as well – you may want to check out Peter Binfield, the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE and Theo Bloom, the Managing Editor of PLoS Biology.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed, on the other hand, is more of an aggregator. It is as much or as little of a conversation as you want it to be. You do not have to balance the three modes and you can use it in one of the modes only and it can still work for you.

I have joined FriendFeed some time ago and I find it extremely useful. This is where I find half of my personal “bloggable” material these days – the eavesdropping mode. I do the broadcast mode by importing the feeds from my blog and my Twitter. I use the conversation mode by “liking” and/or commenting on other people’s stuff (which, in turn, makes me more visible to others). As with Twitter, people who follow me mostly know where I work and are used to seeing an occasional PLoS-related entry from me without considering it to be PR spamming.

FriendFeed, like Twitter, can also be used for ‘Mindcasting’, i.e., aggregating in one place all the necessary links on a topic one needs for writing a future blog post. For example, here I collected all the links to responses to the recent Nature article about science blogging and science journalism.

But what FriendFeed allows people to do in addition, is make a ‘room’. There are a number of science-related rooms on FriendFeed, e.g., The Life Scientists, Science 2.0, BioJobs, Scholarly Communication and Open Access Day, among others. Some very interesting discussions occur in these rooms almost every day. Furthermore, FriendFeed rooms are ideal places for liveblogging conferences, for instance ScienceOnline09, Science Online, Science in the 21st Century Conference, ISMB 2008, BioBarCamp and CISB’09.

You can join the PLoS ONE room if you want to see the PLoS ONE feed imported (as well as the feeds from the PLoS Blog, the PLoS twitter and EveryONE blog). This way I do not have to spam anyone who subscribes to my main feed. Whenever there is a good blog post covering one of the PLoS ONE papers, I add the permalink to that post as a comment on that paper’s feed in the room (feel free to do it yourself if you blog about our papers). Occasionally I may place additional news or links there as well. That way, I can be myself yet still do the marketing for PLoS that I need to do. And nobody’s complained so far. You should give it a try.