Nature as an Example of Web 2.0

As I mentioned in my previous post, Mike Buschman of the IEEE and I presented on Nature as an Example of Web 2.0, about how the Nature Publishing Group is experimenting with Web 2.0 applications. It was a pleasure collaborating with Mike on the presentation, a truly 2.0 experience as we'd never met F2F before starting the project.

Using the Google Docs presentation software was also a worthwhile experience. It's a very good tool for sharing and collaborating on documents, one I would wholeheartedly recommend. No more emailing PowerPoints back and forth and subsequent versioning problems. A couple of issues did arise: first, it's not a easy to print out as PPT so that was a bit of a complication for the meeting organizers; also, it doesn't export to PPT format so you either have to have a live link to show the presentation or export to html format and use a browser which is a little inconvenient.

What we hoped to accomplish with this presentation was to give a quick overview of what one particular publisher is doing in the Web 2.0 space and to provoke some discussion about the possibilities of those tools in our various environments. It was interesting to see how people in those different environments saw these possibilities differently, in ways that I certainly didn't expect but was very happy and interested to hear. I think we were pretty successful; it's an area I find very interesting and worth pursuing so I'm sure I'll be posting more on using 2.0 tools for scholarly publishing and disseminating science.