Blog Action Day

While clearing the huge backlog of unread feeds accumulating in my feed reader during a long train journey from Cambridge to Manchester, I came across an interesting concept: “Blog Action Day”.

Blog Action Day was invented by Collis Ta’eed, an Australian web designer who came up with the following idea: what if every blog in the world talked about the same pressing issue that needs talking about on the same day? So, for example, the environment, global warming, political events etc….? What would happen if we could collectively leverage the power of the long tail? Who will read this? Well people subscribing directly to a participating blog, people reading link blogs and automatically generated summaries. And, most likely, the mainstram media will pick it up too.

The idea is a fascinating one. This year, it is the environment that blogs are concerned with and so millions of blog readers should be hit with environmental topics on a given day, no matter where they turn.

The chemical bloggosphere is small, of course, but steadily growing and gaining momentum. So here are some questions:

What could motivate us, the chemical bloggosphere, to pick up the idea of a blog action day? What interest in the chemical bloggosphere could be so transcendent, that we could agree upon using one day to talk about the same thing, or to do the same thing? What could motivate all of us, to spend one day every so often, to, for example, contribute to a joint resource?

What would it take? What could we do?

I’d be interested in comments and suggestions.

The Semantic Web of Data

Peter has already blogged that Paul Miller visited us yesterday and gave an excellent talk on evolving the Web from a Web of Documents to a semantic web of data. He does so without any jargon and using beautiful slides and his talk is a wonderful explanation of the philosophy we have taken in polymer informatics.

In short, it is stuff that everyone should know about and certainly scientists – it will change the way in which we report, analyze and distribute data and scientific information forever. Paul has kindly allowed us to video his talk and to upload it to Google. Treat yourself and watch Paul’s talk here:

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2007

goes to Gert Ertel of Germany for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. Here’s the link to the announcement.