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The Interwebs could become an early warning system for when the web of life is about to fray.

By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.

BioInformatics LLC conducted a survey in November 2007 that found some interesting trends:





• 77% of life scientists participate in some type of social media


• 50% see blogs, discussion groups, online communities, and social networking as beneficial to sharing ideas with colleagues


• 85% see social media affecting their decision-making


• Discussion groups and message boards are still the most-used types of sites, but online communities are gaining fast


• User-generated content is not completely trusted for product information, but it is more trusted than information in printed trade magazines, editorial web sites, or online portals

Elsevier’s survey went a little further than the earlier survey, asking respondents to name sites. This generated a Top 11 list of social media sites in the sciences:





1. Nature Network (36%)


2. BioMed Experts (35%)


3. Facebook (35%)


4. MySpace (34%)


5. LinkedIn (33%)


6. ResearcherID (19%)


7. CiteULike (18%)


8. 2collab (18%)


9. del.icio.us (15%)


10. Connotea (14%)


11. Digg (14%)

What is surprising to me is that social media designed specifically to “socialize” traditional workflow functions aren’t used as much. In fact, Connotea, 2collab, and ResearcherID rank lower than most.

These results actually make me question the workflow mental model. Nature Network isn’t about workflow. BioMed Experts is about browsing social networks and connecting, so isn’t much about workflow. Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn? I don’t care how much you force-fit those into workflows, they aren’t about work. (LinkedIn can be about finding a job, but not about doing a current job.) Each one is about social connections.

What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?

That's the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.

The idea took shape when Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, was talking with his editor at the press about peer reviewers for the book he was finishing, The book, with the not-so-playful title Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, examines the importance of using both software design and traditional media-studies methods in the study of video games.