IT and Social Media: I’m so far behind I think I’m first
September 28th, 2007 by Hugh KennedyPJA recently launched a survey on social media in the IT world with our partner ITtoolbox. The response has been so positive that we have decided to launch a similar survey about social media use in life science, working with our partner BioInformatics.
Working with BioInformatics has been eye-opening. They’re very smart, of course, and that’s always eye-opening. What has been truly enlightening is that, contrary to some blather I’ve been carrying around in my head, scientists aren’t laggards to the IT crowd in social media, they’ve been ahead all along.
Electronic mail began in the university setting, right down the road from PJA in 1961, in fact, and typically was used between scientists. Tim Berners-Lee developed the idea of hypertext links in 1989 at the European Particle Physics Laboratory. To quote him, “Between the summers of 1991 and 1994, the load on the first Web server (”info.cern.ch”) rose steadily by a factor of 10 every year. In 1992 academia, and in 1993 industry, was taking notice.”
Here’s a more recent and much more robust example: The Science Advisory Board, currently an online community of more than 34,000 scientists founded by BioInformatics, just celebrated its tenth-year anniversary. It features blogs, a discussion forum, member-submitted reviews, white papers, and a ton of user-generated content. As one of their members put it, “It’s like going to a large scientific meeting, only you can go whenever you feel like it.” In short, it’s a social media site, except it has been around since 1997. How savvy was your Web use in 1997?
To quote Bill Kelly, President of BioInformatics, “Long before anyone used the phrase ‘Web 2.0′ we were leveraging the Internet to deliver online professional networking services to life science researchers.”
So, despite the fact that one researcher recently asked me about support groups for scientists who haven’t yet blogged, she’s been ahead of the pack for years now.