Overview: Science&Technology

"whole new publishing and technology system ... continually iterate on the site and take advantage of new technology trends ... instead of seeing major redesigns in the future, users will see more incremental changes" Key question: are the native ads clearly ads? - New York Times redesign points to future of online publishing - Jan. 8, 2014

Great advice for web data analysis everywhere: "We don’t live in a perfect world. Vague requests are going to get floated. ... that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize and strive to minimize how often that happens. Here’s how: - Condition yourself to go to full alert whenever the word “interesting” is used ... - probe for clarification as much …

One guy, a camera and a whiteboard (and millions of views and a book and lots more). Sigh. I miss my super huge whiteboard.

An alternative to Popular Science's approach: "Climate change articles trigger some of the most heated discussions on Ars Technica... a scientific matter with political ramifications, it's also the focus of astroturfers (fake grassroots movements), trolls, and the willfully scientifically illiterate. At Ars, we take trolling very seriously... we…

To think I almost worked on their dotcom project 12 years ago (shiver): "Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their…

A neat approach to using social media to "improve science communication & make it more direct, responsive, and accurate". Given the huge parallels with EU communications ... "Nature editors & reporters get little status markers (aka flairs) to identify their role at Nature ... About a half-dozen keep an eye on r/science to see if any of the top …

Scientific publishing increasingly open to blogs & social media: "An important step towards this goal will be that researchers no longer view dissemination as a separate activity that takes place when research has been concluded. Instead, the research community must consider it as an inherent part of research ... the line between academic and n…

"everyone is keen to board the Big Data bandwagon, yet a comparative few really understand why. " I don't know a huge amount about big data, but I can spot a bandwagon from a light year away, and this one is coming in at very high speed, judging by some of the stuff I'm starting to see. Expecting more entertainment in the years ahead ;)

Came out just after my post on applying network theory and the EU online public sphere: "For those of us who are interested in understanding and participating in the EU digital public sphere(s), social network analysis offers a useful way to identify key influencers and map different communities. I can see plenty of practical applications (for e…

"Because ideas are like germs: they don't diffuse through populations of people at random; they make their way through networks"

"Just understanding “what is Big Data” is a challenge for a significant number of people" - ReadWrite, quoting Gartner. "Different industries have different priorities ... Industries that are driving the customer experience priority are retail, insurance, media and communications, and banking, while process efficiency is a top priority for manufa…

"Semantic web, social network analysis, entity extraction, and news-as-API ... nerd stuff, but it will become important — a few news projects are already working on it. If they can prove these ideas can be good for business, others will follow." Nieman Journalism Lab with a few trenchant views on reinvigorating news in S. America, of which only o…

"If we want a powerful innovative culture in schools which is self-sustaining we have to empower system-aware practitioners, working ever more closely with the service users, to create it. And to avoid simply creating interesting but isolated experiments, we have to design in collaborative ways of learning and enquiry between professionals – a “pu…

"I think companies such as Asana (which I love) will be the future of business consultancy. They will substitute the big consultancies leveraging big data, just like Coursera will displace traditional course providers by leveraging information on how people use training and using this information to design more effective training. Business consult…

Gratifyingly, the preview of the Hashtag Europe wireframes seemed to do the job, and allow people to understand just what this tool could do...

" "It takes courage to talk to customers but you have to do it,” Ritson would say. “First the qualitative, then the quantitative," he repeated. Interview customers (qualitative) before you create surveys (quantitative)."

As I've mentioned now and then (e.g., BloggingPortal's 3rd birthday, 2012), a desultory conversation amongst Bloggingportal editors dragged on for several years, before dying after it became clear that the lack of decision-making process made it impossible to move forward.

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…

"The entwined rise of Big Data and predictive analytics virtually guarantees that — just as structured and semi-structured data are being fused — informal gossip and formal ratings systems will be collected, correlated, and converted into business rules designed to make badly-behaved customers pay more or go away." Interesting insight into an upc…

"The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an in-depth tutorial designed to help you convert more passive website visitors into active users that engage with your content or purchase your products."

"Beacons are a small wireless sensors placed inside any physical space that transmit data to your iPhone using Bluetooth Low Energy (aka Bluetooth 4.0, Bluetooth Smart). ... Smartphones that are in an iBeacon zone will benefit from personalized microlocation-based notification and actions." - huge potential for conferences, exhibitions, network…

The first site launched (in 2011-2012) on the EC's Multisite Drupal7 Platform, thus pioneering EC Drupal Platforms in terms of technology, user requirement defitinition and governance.

Migrating and relaunching the ACP Courier magazine website using semantic analysis and launching two community-oriented Programme websites for the ACP Secretariat.

I've finally gotten around to updating my avatars here and there to show my support to Benoit Poelevoorde's call earlier this year to stop shaving. Why? And why won't it help solve Belgium's political crisis? And what's this got to do with Europe? I don't tend to write much about Belgian affairs ...

A few weeks before the Hungarian media storm broke late last year, the BloggingPortal editors were contacted by the (then upcoming) Hungarian Presidency team, seeking ideas for how they could cooperate with the Euroblogosphere. Being a loosely-at-best organised gang of volunteers, it took us a while to respond. To their immense credit...

When I came to Brussels in 1991 it was as a science writer. It remained my profession for many years, so when scienceblogs.com was launched in 2006 I checked it out ... but never really had the time to follow it. Now via another (ex?)science writer, I hear news of scienceblog's sudden implosion following a tragic loss of ethical compass.

I stumbled upon a short video on the BBC of Tim Berners-Lee trying to explain the importance of the data web, aka semantic web, again. He himself says that he can't say where it will lead us, as it is paradigm changing. True - but I can think of a few applications that anyone interested in the EU should know about. I can't embed the vide…

When you want to create a community, asking uses what they need is the best way to start. We launched the 1-page website, with user survey, newsletter signup and social, inside two weeks of winning the project. Everything we developed the following year (2010) was based on the results.

Of course, when we launched the first interactive website for the IST Event (IST 2002) we didn’t know it was a Web2.0 site. That term only appeared two years later

At one point I was editing something like 200 research project profiles, 4 editions of EUREKA News (5 languages), 7 editions of Innovation & Technology Transfer (5 languages), several annual reports and brochures, on paper and online, as well as (from 1995) designing, creating and managing their websites.Not that this was all single-handed. In…