ChemSpider Blog

An interesting post on the end of cyberspace blog regarding whether online databases and journals are changing scientists’ reading habits. I always feel its more appropriate to give the original blogger the traffic so pop over and read the post here.

I think the extract below might tempt you to do so…

” Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.”

Oh bless the power of the blogosphere. I have about 250 blogs on my blogroll and one of them is wikinomics. AS with all things nowadays, email, voice mail, mail itself, I have to get through them all at a rather frantic pace just to leave time for real work. reading through 135 new blog posts generated overnight I hit a very interesting post by Jude Fiorillo all about the SearchMe.com search engine and its visual way of displaying hits. LOVE IT!!!

What does this “yet one more search engine” offer? Judes comments “What’s special about this search engine is that when you query a topic, the websites returned to you are displayed visually (similar to Apple’s cover flow) rather than in list form. A picture is worth 1000 words so they say, so it makes sense that with 1 quick look at the preview pane of a website, you can better filter your results, and roughly gauge the quality of the website (by it’s professionalism and aesthetic, available content, and general message).”

Does it deliver…oh yes. I did a search on ChemSpider and I saw the results here. I “saw” web pages about ChemSpider I’d never seen before. Easy to navigate. Very sweet. These guys will get bought by Google…

I am looking for someone with a good understanding of carbohydrate chemistry to join the ChemSpider Advisory Group and help us “get carbohydrates right” on the ChemSpider database. It would be sweet if someone could help us clean up the abundance of data on the site and offer us their skills. It might be a good project for a student to work on with us as it will require some research to make sure that we end up with REFERENCE quality data fo rothers to use. Anybody interested?