ChemSpider Blog

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I have essentially stayed away from my computer over the weekend pondering the Creative Commons discussions about ChemSpider. I’ve spent time playing with our twins, landscaping and “contemplating my navel”.  After what happened at the end of last week regarding the shared opinions on our adoption of Creative Commons licenses I needed to spend sometime away from the computer. My frustration level has been increasing of late since ChemSpider has been put in the spotlight for so many reasons, and very few of them positive. Even this is strange considering we have now topped 6000 users per day, we receive kudos and blessings from our users and, overall, I believe we are making a positive contribution to our intention to build a community for chemists.

Nevertheless, ChemSpider has become the “Free Access Chemistry Site du jour” for certain individuals to poke at. We appear to be the “model of concern” - lots of discussions going on about ChemSpider is “this” and “that”, we need to consider our business model, ChemSpider needs licenses and many other commentaries. Thanks for discussing us out there in the blogosphere. Would you like to talk TO US instead? I’d appreciate having someone advise us on licensing etc at a minimum.

Anyhow, I was in the mood for a good belly laugh tonight when someone pointed me to a recent post by Rich Apodaca entitled “Just a Flesh Wound” and parodying the Semantic Web , RDFs etc. with Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s infamous blood and gore scene. I say go visit the site and, if you’ve been watching the many discussions in this area I think you’ll giggle too.

Like most users of WordPress we use Akismet to deal with our spam. Unfortunately it appears that it might be a little hungry and is chewing on some real comments too according to this blog post by John Wilbanks. John was responding to the Creative Commons on ChemSpider licensing discussion. I’ll comment more on that later.

Please  know that I never willingly deny any posts made to the ChemSpider blog and moderate only to keep the “bad stuff” off of the site. If you try to post and it doesn’t show up there in 48 hours (even I take downtime) please send the post to infoATchemspiderDOTcom and it will get posted on your behalf OR I will try and dig it out of Akismet. As you can see below though…we do get a LOT of Spam!

A picture tells it all. Look at the image below..the result of a search on ChemSpider on Google. Click on the image to see the full size detail. The search gives almost 7.5 MILLION hits on ChemSpider. Hmmmm…is the result of the very active discussion about ChemSpider and Creative Commons that has occurred over the weekend? It does seem to have generated a lot of interest. The reality…within a few minutes of this search it had settled back down to about 300,000 hits. Google was probably recalculating PageRank or something. Nevertheless, kind of fun to see!