Everyone’s been talking about recently, the free website creator from Google, and even I have a page I’ve been playing around with: I call it . But I’ve found something very similiar and very interesting: infogami. It’s a free webpage creator. You simply enter a subdomain in the provided box, provide an email (a working one if you want to keep your page - you can create and play with the site without confirming the email), and there you are!

A great thing about infogami is that you can allow anyone to edit your site! Which makes it sort of a wiki.

Check out mine: Share Wonders at infogami.

It comes with a blog too. There’s no option to comment but there is a feed. Maybe comments will be added later. infogami is not even a beta yet, apparently.

Oh, they have a developer blog.

The format used for editing pages is not HTML, it’s something called Markdown. You can play with a Markdown sandbox if you like.

If you use Google Talk or Wikipedia at all you may be familiar with this type of text formatting and markup code:

*italic* **bold**
_italic_ __bold__

This is a link to Share Wonders
[Share Wonders](https://sharewonders.com/ "Share Wonders")

Very nice. I expect to hear more about infogami soon.

The Royal Society of Chemistry, a European organization for advancing the chemical sciences, investigates the claim that Wikipedia ‘could become the main source of chemical information in 5�10 years’. The claim was made by a professional chemist who contributes to Wikipedia.

The article notes that:

This finding is supported by regular contributor Martin Walker, assistant professor of organic chemistry at the State University of New York at Potsdam, US. Many of the chemistry entries are now reasonably accurate, he said, but you have to know where to look.

According to Walker ‘there are around 10 PhD-qualified chemistry contributors, as well as several knowledgeable graduate and undergraduate chemists’ that contribute to chemistry articles on Wikipedia.

If a free service were to become an often cited and reliable source of chemistry information it would be positive, because costly reference print materials and online databases can strain school and library budgets, or may even be beyond their reach. Cost is a barrier to information. Students attending schools that can’t afford to update their expensive reference collection every year are at a disadvantage. Wikipedia is becoming an avenue to information access that transcends economic boundaries. It may someday even the playing field, and I hope it does. I wish that more chemistry professionals, and experts in other fields, see the promise for equitable education in Wikipedia and contribute.

Found [Via]

Tech.memeoroandum is depository of information and discussions pertaining to technology:

The Web is humming with reports and opinions on technology. tech.memeorandum is page A1 for these discussions. Auto-updated every 5 minutes, it uncovers the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs.

They have a feed available. Looks like a great science related resource, and many people seem to know about it already: almost 2,000 subscribers to the feed I chose on bloglines!

science, information, research

Postgenomic is a life science web log aggregator, but it does more than that:

Postgenomic collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.

For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of which web sites are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often by bioinformaticians, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently by evolutionary biologists.

Sounds interesting. It has three feeds you can subscribe to: recent top stories, recent reviews, and recent hot papers. I found out about this via The Social Software Weblog. They report that it’s currently limited to 155 blogs, and that it’s been up for less than a week. The creator of postgenomic is an anonymous scientist named ‘Stew’ who’s working on the project anonymously for fear of losing his job!

life, science, research

San Francisco’s Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception has a remarkable web presence. The site has more than 15,000 web pages with audio and video files, ‘exploring hundreds of different topics’. Included in these many pages is a section that has instructions for more than 500 simple experiments, a mixture of online exhibits using interactive technologies like Flash, and live webcasts from the Museum floor.

Their mission is best stated on their about page:

Our focus is on investigating the science behind the ordinary subjects and experiences of people’s lives. The topics themselves provide “hooks” that get people excited about science. Then, when we investigate these topics, we can also look at the historical and social issues surrounding them, thus providing a context for scientific exploration.

science, information

If there’s something that librarians and Google have in common, it’s that they both want to provide easy access to information for users. Some have predicted the death of libraries because of Google. However while, yes, it’s changed how users use the library, it will not lead to their extinction. Google as a company is very supportive of libraries, and it with it’s of books for and .

Google has again demonstrated its commitment to libraries for Google Scholar: it will now link to libraries that participate in the OCLC’s Open WorldCat program when an article listed in a search result is available in a library. There’s more information about how Google Scholar works with libraries on its . Google also has a newsletter that is written specifically for libraries: and, moreover, has a that they’ll expand, hopefully. Internet search engines and libraries have common goals, although with a different twist, and through collaboration can enhance everyone’s access to information as best as possible.

I would feel better though if though if there were a large non-profit search engine that libraries could collaborate with. I hope that Google, and other search engines continue to embrace libraries, they are an important part of information services to citizens, clients, and customers regardless of the information need. If you want to learn more about what librarians think about Google you should check out what the .

, library,information, search