Sure, a lot of that data is user generated: pictures, instant messages, tweets, wall posts. Nevertheless, it’s valuable; in fact, it’s valuable because it’s user generated. Just ask Facebook about advertising and data mining.

All that data represents the future of many businesses as they seek to be more competitive in a global market. I’m sure you can name some of them: tech companies like Google and LinkedIn. But because of all that data, the lines are blurring between traditional non-information technology companies and IT companies.

Case in point: retail giant Wal-Mart. The company has been hiring a lot of developers to staff its @Walmartlabs unit. What is @WalmartLabs?

In May 2011, Wal-Mart purchased Kosmix, a social media technology provider that created a platform that enables users to filter and organize content in social networks.

Content in social networks = Big Data

Walmart bought Kosmix to integrate data from social and mobile commerce. @Walmartlabs is building what they call a ”Social Genome,” based on billions of messages from social media, blog posts, YouTube videos, and more, and organizing that content to connect people with the information that matters to them.

The Social Genome is a huge, constantly changing, knowledgebase, with hundreds of millions of entities and relationships between them. @WalmartLabs can use the Social Genome to infer interests from and provide context for data from social media.

The real power comes in when Wal-Mart is able to combine data on purchase history with data from social networks with actual transaction history. As Anand Rajaraman, who runs @WalmartLabs, put it in an interview with Reuters’ Alistair Barr: “It’s a race to see who can use all this data the best. This will change the retail industry, as well as most other industries.” The transaction history shows what customers have bought in the past, while social networking data has the potential to show what they may buy in the future.

via SmartPlanet

This wiki is for ANY scientist to have a wiki page about them online. We have no notability guidelines in place, and hopefully will not need them. Time will tell. The hope is that scientists will contribute their own articles, that the community will also contribute/edit/expand and that ultimately, when the article is in good enough shape, it might be used as the source of an article on Wikipedia. There it can be challenged, discussed, edited and moved through all of the potential phases of a Wikipedia article before it is accepted. We believe that all scientists are entitled to a presence that ScientistsDB can enable. As the data are gathered then we have the possibility of starting to form network maps, relationships and connections that would have been unavailable before. We have a way to introduce scientists working in the same domain, connecting people working on the same classes of compounds, diseases, genes, etc. This is all part of a potential future…for now the Wikipedia articles for scientists (almost 50,000 of them) have been harvested and kept categorized according to Wikipedia categories and all scientists are welcomed to add their own articles. All content is licensed according to CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Here’s my page on the ScientistsDB. Are you a scientist? Why aren’t you on the ScientistsDB?

I stumbled across this infographic last week and was pleased to find that many of my roles — all of which are now on my business card — are classified as “Likely geek jobs”, including Web design/development, marketer, and entrepreneur. (And here’s another one: during my undergraduate education I worked as a bartender.)

Geek or Nerd — which are you?

Via: Image of the Day: Geeks vs Nerds

I captured all the tweets from ScienceOnline2012 last week, starting on Tuesday January 17th around 2:00 am and ending on Sunday, January 22rd around 10:30 pm. In total, there were 17,800 tweets comprising 302,592 words. I then set to work building a ScienceOnline2012 tag cloud.

From 302,592 words, 17,827 were unique. I calculated the frequency of all 17,827 words and then “cleaned” the data, removing all words less than 4 characters, numbers, and words that were either common words (such as “that”, “from” or “your”) or gibberish (consisting principally of url strings from shared links). I also removed the top two terms — scio12 (mentioned 18,087 times) and rt (mentioned 8,059 times) — since their frequency was so much higher than the third top term — science (mentioned 2,518 times) — which distorted the tag cloud.

The top 300 terms were them imported into Wordle and a weighted tag cloud was generated. Feel free to download any of the files below and reshare.

Here’s the top 10 terms from the cloud above:

All data and images are avaliable for download: low-resolution image, high-resolution image or raw data set of 300 words with frequencies.

At ScienceOnline2012, Simon Frantz and I moderated a session on managing information and I think it went really well: there was a a lot of participation from attendees (the room was packed!) and some really good ideas were discussed. After the session, several people told me they found the session very informative.

I asked Perrin Ireland, a science communicator whose work seeks to bridge the gaps between science and art, to scribe the session for us. Her stunning illustration is below (click on it for a high-res image). Thanks again Perrin!

Drowning in Information! How Can We Create Organization & Balance

Tools and strategies for managing information overload (science and otherwise) (discussion)

We’re all suffering from the same condition: information overload and filter failure. Yet some people seem to manage the torrent of information more efficiently and effortlessly than others. What’s their secret? We’ll take a tour of some of the tools available to manage the mass of science-related content — from RSS to reference managers, and from collaboration docs to social aggregation. We’ll also reveal the daily reading habits of some of the best-known purveyors of science content, and come armed with your own tips for battling info overload too.

See all the session info, notes, survey answers, links and slides at the ScienceOnline2012 wiki page Drowning in Information!

For starters, I’m a computational biologist at the Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence. I do discovery research, integrating data from a number of different domains, including biomedical literature, high-throughput genomic or proteomic experiments, and clinical data, to interpret experiments, develop new hypotheses or identify new indications. I routinely text mine, integrate and analyze data. I also curate knowledge on biomarkers and personalized medicine at Biomarker Commons. I use my knowledge and experience with search tools and the Web to aggregate, filter, identify, organize, contextualize and share the most relevant news and research content on biomarkers.

In addition, I’m a new media journalist; I started Highlight HEALTH over five years ago and currently serve as editor. With a staff of three other writers, we promote advances in biomedical research and new ideas in health and medicine to over 12,000 visitors every month. Lastly, I’m a developer: I know PHP, MySQL, and Apache, and have built (and currently maintain) several websites using both WordPress and Drupal, including this website, all the Highlight HEALTH websites, Biomarker Commons, CRO Track and the soon-to-be launched DIY-Bio Indy.

The challenge is representing all those things on a single business card. I’ve had separate cards for Covance and Highlight HEALTH, but I’ve always felt that they sold me short.

I finally had time tonight to get some new business cards printed out for ScienceOnline2012 and I have to say, I’m quite pleased with the way they turned out. This card covers all my principle roles and displays a Quick Response (QR) code along with all the various ways to get in touch with me (phone, email and web). I even included a tag cloud on the back of the card, highlighting terms that represent me and my interests.

What I like best about this card is that I can use it in any situation; whether I’m representing Covance, Highlight HEALTH, Biomarker Commons or myself, this business card will always work. ScienceOnline2012 is two days away: time to get down to business.

I’ve selected sessions that focus on my interests: data and information (from generating to managing), medicine (basic science, genomics), analytics/metrics, and media (as I continue to build Highlight HEALTH, I’m interested in editing and context).

Are you attending any of the sessions below? Let’s make sure to connect at the conference: leave me a comment below, send me message on Twitter, or use the website’s contact form.

Thursday, January 19th

8:00am-9:45am @ McKimmon Conference Center

Morning check in

9:45am-10:00am @ Room 1c/d

Welcome remarks and conference overview

Moderators: Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic, Karyn Traphagen

10:00am-11:15am

Free

11:15am-12:15pm @ Room 8

Dealing with Data

Moderators: Antony Williams, Kaitlin Thaney

On the importance of data publication, data management, and discovery in the sciences – from the tools that serve as enablers (ChemSpider, FigShare) to the broader issues affecting how we approach data-driven science and sharing of information (access, ownership, social stigma). This session will build upon Open Data sessions of the past, and look at how we can make better use of information to not only surface new insights, but do better science, as well as reward contributions in a way that reflects the move to digital.

12:15pm-1:30pm

Lunch

1:30pm-2:15pm @ Room 1c/d

Going from Blogging to MSM: Selling Out or Gateway Drug?

Moderators: Hannah Waters, Lucas Brouwers

This session intends to be part how–to, and part a wider discussion about transitioning from the blogger mindset to more traditional journalism. We plan to feature testimony from editors dealing with writers fresh-from-the-wordpress to get a sense of the other side of the table.

2:30pm-2:45pm

Break

2:45pm-3:45pm @ Room 3

The Basic Science Behind the Medical Research: Where to Find It, How and When to Use It

Moderators: Emily Willingham, Deborah Blum

This session will involve moderators with experience incorporating basic science information into medically based pieces with their insights into the whens and whys of using it. The session will also include specific examples of what the moderators and audience have found works and doesn’t work from their own writing.

3:45pm-4:00pm

Break

4:00pm-5:00pm @ Room 5

Data Visualization (Workshop)

Moderators: Ashley Yaeger

This hands-on workshop explores how to use data to report and tell stories visually using the latest tools, such as Google Fusion tables, to create data visualizations. Participants will break into groups and visualize a provided data set, while workshop leaders circulate to answer questions and give feedback and tips on best practices and design. What to bring: laptops with power supply.

6:30pm-8:30pm

Free

8:30pm-11:00pm @ Napper Tandy’s

Talent show & open-mic night

Friday, January 20th

8:00am-9:30am @ McKimmon Conference Center

Morning check in

9:30am-10:30am @ Room 5

Using Altmetrics Tools to Track the Online Impact of your Research

Moderators: Euan Adie, Martin Fenner

We will briefly introduce the field of altmetrics, present the outcomes of an analysis performed especially for Science Online and then demo tools including ScienceCard, altmetric, and Total Impact . We will finish with a discussion of how these metrics might be used as alternatives and supplements to citation-based approaches.

10:30am-10:45am

Break

10:45am-11:45am @ Room 5

The Semantic Web

Moderators: Antony Williams, Kristi Holmes

The session will provide a basic introduction to semantic web-based projects and highlight different perspectives from people working in this space. We’ll show *why* this technology is being used in so many areas — and demonstrate the benefits of linked data (especially in areas related to data reuse for visualizations, research discovery, and more).

11:45am-12:00pm

Break

12:00pm-1:00pm @ Room 1c/d

I Can Haz Context?

Moderators: Maggie Koerth-Baker, Ed Yong

This session focuses on achieving context in science journalism: how it works for different media (print, blogs etc), what types of context are actually useful, how do journalists balance time and depth, how can we use the tools of the internet to provide context, and how can context in science writing actually help science itself?

1:00pm-2:00pm

Lunch

2:00pm-4:45pm @ Room 7

Techno Blitz Demos: Credit, Identity & Making Science Available

2:00-2:15pm

Get Credit for all of your Research

Mark Hahnel. FigShare, an open data project that allows researchers to publish their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner.

2:15-2:30pm

Writing for Robots: Getting your Research Noticed in the Algorithmic Era

William Gunn, Mendeley. A discussion on how some of the major search algorithms work, how knowledge of the algorithms can make you a better writer, and how search and recommendation work together to bring you just the right paper at the right time.

2:30-2:45pm

ORCID

Martin Fenner. Launching in 2012, Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) was incorporated as an independent, non-profit organization in 2010 to solve the name ambiguity problem in scholarly research and communication by establishing a global, open registry to provide persistent, unique identifiers for researchers.

2:45-3:00pm

Break

3:00-3:15pm

Research Discovery: Finding Networking Nirvana on the Semantic Web

Kristi Holmes. VIVO is an open source, open ontology research discovery platform for hosting information about scientists and their interests, activities, and accomplishments.

3:15-3:30pm

Article-Level Metrics (ALM) at PLoS

Jennifer Lin. A presentation of the features and use of Article-Level Metrics (ALM) in research discovery (filtering, aggregating, and navigating the research of others) as well as professional advancement (tracking, benchmarking, and evaluating one’s own research). It will describe the value of ALMs for scientific researchers, funding agencies, academic institutions, and governmental organizations.

3:30-3:45pm

Break

3:45-4:00pm

PaperCritic

Jason Priem (on behalf of Martin Bachwerk). PaperCritic aims to improve communicating advances in science by offering researchers a way of monitoring all types of feedback about their scientific work, as well as allowing everyone to easily review the work of others, in a fully open and transparent environment. An overview of the PaperCritic site’s main functions and a discussion of some plans for the future.

4:00-4:15pm

Annotum

Carl Leubsdorf. In this live demonstration, we will show how Annotum, an open source, open access scholarly authoring and publishing system based on WordPress, can be used by scholarly authors to collaboratively author articles with rich text formatting, structured figures and equations, and citations. Then we’ll show how authors can submit their article to a peer-review process, demonstrate the review and approval workflow, and publish the approved article online as well as in PDF and NLM-compatible XML formats.

4:15-4:30pm

Break

4:30-4:45pm

REACH NC

Sharlini Sankaran. Leaders from UNC General Administration, NC State University, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, and the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) have partnered with Elsevier to create REACH NC (Research, Engagement And Capabilities Hub of North Carolina), a portal to access information on the expertise of university personnel.

4:45-5:00pm

Get Visible or Vanish: Digital Publishing for Science Professionals

Courtney Enzor. In today’s digital age, “publish or perish” has become “get visible or vanish.” How do you build this critical visibility the right way without undermining traditional academic and publishing opportunities? Building visibility is more than just posting on a WordPress blog and waiting for people to find you; it’s about creating a comprehensive online presence in the right environment that showcases the range of your work and makes you more likely to be found, understood, cited and published by mainstream media and journals. The BestThinking content publishing platform is key to creating ranked visibility. As an open access publisher and syndicator of journal quality content, we help you publish all elements of your work, from articles and blogs to conferences speeches and eBooks. BestThinking offers a comprehensive platform to a respectful community of identity verified experts and provides full customer support from real people.

6:00pm-9:00pm @ Room 2

Banquet & Storytelling with The Monti

Saturday January 21, 2012

9:30am-10:30am @ Room 3

Data Journalism: Talking the talk (Workshop)

Moderators: Ruth Spencer, Lena Groeger

This workshop will explore how to get started and launch into a whirlwind tour through the (free!) resources for journalists looking to work with data. This will be less of a workshop and more of a crash course: What you need to know before you even know what you need to know (about data journalism).

10:30am-10:45am

Break

10:45am-11:45am @ Room 5

Drowning in Information! How Can We Create Organization & Balance – Tools and strategies for managing information overload (science and otherwise)

Moderators: Walter Jessen, Simon Franz

We’re all suffering from the same condition: information overload and filter failure. Yet some people seem to manage the torrent of information more efficiently and effortlessly than others. What’s their secret? We’ll take a tour of some of the tools available to manage the mass of science-related content — from RSS to reference managers, and from collaboration docs to social aggregation. We’ll also reveal the daily reading habits of some of the best-known purveyors of science content, and come armed with your own tips for battling info overload too.

11:45am-1:00pm

Lunch

1:00pm-2:00pm @ Room 6

Genomic Medicine: From Bench to Bedside

Moderators: Kristi Holmes, Sandra Porter

An introduction to the topic of personalized medicine from the perspective of major stakeholders including: scientists, physicians, patients and their advocates, community groups and media professionals. We’ll begin with an introduction to the basic concepts and efforts in this area, followed by a discussion of information resources to serve stakeholder groups including relevant clinical, consumer health, and advocacy and policy resources. Various initiatives by government agencies, the commercial sector and academia will be discussed, including: Genetics Home Reference, 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and more.

2:00pm-2:15pm

Break

2:15pm-3:30pm

Cyberscreen Science Film Festival

Moderators: Joanne Manaster, Carin Bondar

3:30pm-3:45pm

Break

3:45pm-4:45pm

Plenary Panel: Check, check, 1, 2…The sticky wicket of the scientist-journalist relationship

Moderators: David Kroll, Bora Zivkovic, Maggie Koerth-Baker, Seth Mnookin

4:45pm

Closing remarks

Information overload is a term popularized by the sociologist Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock, which examines the effects of rapid industrial and technological changes upon the individual, the family and society. Information overload refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information.

In Future Shock, Toffler writes:

If overstimulation at the sensory level increases the distortion with which we percieve reality, cognitive overstimulation interferes with our ability to “think.” [...] Managers plagued by demands for rapid, incessant and complex decisions; pupils deluged with facts and hit with repeated tests; housewives confronted with squalling children, jangling telephones, broken washing machines, the wail of rock and roll from the teenager’s living room and the whine of the television set in the parlor — may well find their ability to think and act clearly impaired by the waves of information crashing into their senses. It is more than possible that some of the symptoms noted among battle-stressed soldiers, disaster victims, and culture shocked travelers are related to this kind of information overload.

As a computational biologist and new media journalist, I’ve always been fascinated with information and how an individual can organize, filter and search that information. So has Simon Frantz [Twitter: @simon_frantz], a science features editor at BBC Worldwide and creator of the Nobel Prize Watch blog. Together, we’re moderating a session on managing information overload at the ScienceOnline2012 conference in North Carolina later this month (currently scheduled for Saturday, January 21st from 10:45am-11:45am). Here’s the session abstract:

Drowning in Information! How Can We Create Organization & Balance

Tools and strategies for managing information overload (science and otherwise) (discussion)

We’re all suffering from the same condition: information overload and filter failure. Yet some people seem to manage the torrent of information more efficiently and effortlessly than others. What’s their secret? We’ll take a tour of some of the tools available to manage the mass of science-related content — from RSS to reference managers, and from collaboration docs to social aggregation. We’ll also reveal the daily reading habits of some of the best-known purveyors of science content, and come armed with your own tips for battling info overload too.

We Need Your Help

Neither Simon nor I consider ourselves experts at managing information overload. Sure, we can give some tips and describe strategies that work for us, but there’s other people that manage information just as good as we do (maybe even better). And as the session will be held in unconference format, everyone in the room is both a source and destination of thought.

That said, we need to know how YOU manage digital information. To find out, we’ve prepared a short, 10 question survey on information management. Even if you’re not attending the ScienceOnline2012 conference, I encourage you to take the survey. At the conference, we’ll summarize the results and profile some of the respondents who excel at managing information overload. We hope you’ll join us in the discussion.

So, tell us: how do you manage digital information?

As with most professions, in science, time and money are precious resources. Thus, as I’ve selected conferences to attend this year, I’ve kept in mind my goals: (i) stay current with what’s hot in computational biology and data science, (ii) network and make contacts from people in my field(s) of interest, (iii) learn about new approaches for data integration, analysis and visualization.

Network Science

I’m spending more and more time using networks to visualize and contextualize data from text mining. As I mentioned in my post Biomarkers, Personalized Medicine Meetings in 2011, one of the conferences I was hoping to attend this year was the International Workshop on Network Theory: Network Science. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that a workshop is scheduled for 2012. However, I did find two other meetings on network science that I’m looking forward to attending in June: NetSci and the ACM Web Science.

FutureMed

I’m also looking forward to reading more about FutureMed from Singularity University. As I wrote last year in The Future of Healthcare and FutureMed, I predict that soon, researchers like me that can understand, integrate and interpret biological data will work together with physicians in the clinic to deliver truly integrative biomedicine and personalized healthcare.

The multidisciplinary program, covering biomedical research, medicine and healthcare, is a great format from which to understand and recognize the opportunities and influences of new technologies, as well as the affects from converging fields. I’d love to have the opportunity to attend and not only learn but contribute to the discussion. Indeed, my interests in information and technology led me to relaunch Highlight HEALTH 2.0 last month, focusing on new ideas in health and medicine.

Data Science

Lastly, I spent some time this year looking for a “data science” meeting — somehow I missed the O’Reilly Strata conference. I’m looking forward to attending this years meeting Making Data Work. From the website:

Strata Conference is the leading event for the people and technology driving the data revolution. The home of data science, Strata brings together practitioners, researchers, IT leaders and entrepreneurs to discuss big data, Hadoop, analytics, visualization and data markets.

If you’re reading this and will be attending any of the meetings listed below, please let me know. It would be great to make new connections.You can leave a comment below or contact me directly, either by the contact form, email or DM on Twitter or Friendfeed.

Confirmed or potential science conferences to attend in 2012

1. ScienceOnline 2012, the sixth annual international meeting on science and the Web. [confirmed] January 19 – 21, 2012; North Carolina State University, North Carolina
2. New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) “Biomarkers and Brain Imaging of Presymptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease: Exploring the Silent Years” [confirmed] January 24th, 2012; New York
3. Molecular Med Tri-Con 2012 February 21 – 23, 2012; San Francisco, CA
4. O’Reilly Strata Conference Making Data Work February 28 – March 1, 2012; Santa Clara, CA
5. 11th Annual Systems Biology Symposium, Systems Biology & the Microbiome April 15 – 16, 2012; Seattle, WA
6. BioIT Conferences & Big Data 2012 April 24 – 26, 2012; Boston, MA
7. NetSci – Conference on Network Science June 18 – 22, 2012; Evanston, IL
8. ACM Web Science 2012 June 22 – 24, 2012; Evanston, IL
9. International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) July 15 – 17, 2012; Long Beach, CA
10. American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) October 14 – 18, 2012; Chicago, IL

If you’re interested in Biomarker and/or Personalized Medicine Conferences, I’ve compiled a list of meetings at BiomarkerCommons.org, my ongoing project to curate the latest news and developments on biomarkers.

Novartis to shut brain research facility, redirect efforts to the genetics of psychiatric and cognitive disorders. http://t.co/eDpDJLsc

Europe’s largest IT company bans email http://t.co/WwB8bRX0

The Company That Outlawed Email: just because most people use a tool doesn’t mean it’s the best tool to use http://t.co/H86CgbWT

iPubSci: A Solution to the Problem of Unaffordable Science Journals http://t.co/Xji96QEq

Eli Lilly CEO sees computational tools as key to R&D boost http://t.co/cgxF2Yun

Biotechs fear being overlooked by the big CROs; Covance http://t.co/JA5iMUKL

All links shared via Twitter – follow along!