TK pointed out in a conversation today that theoretically, what we really need for recording labwork digitally is something that provides the episodic, syndicated content of blogs with the collaborative and revision qualities of a wiki.
Much of the utility of such a system would come not just from having a record of your work online, but from the network effects engendered when that information was well-formed and tagged and shared in a quasi-standard way (the lower-case semantic web) with a community of similar users. The devil is in the details, and sharing information at such a fine level of granularity in a way that lets users pay attention to just what content is most likely to be relevant (via tags and perhaps some predictive metrics) could help users not make the same mistake collectively more than once. It might even allow users to perceive and draw conclusions about phenomena that were too subtle or rare to be investigated previously.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
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I'd suspect that if you looked at a few biotech companies then they are already on the ball with this, but with proprietary systems I expect. Just a hunch, maybe they still use pen and paper..
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