Last Friday afternoon (was it really only a week ago?) about 200 people made their way to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the fourth SciFoo. There are many people who got their blog posts out well before me so I will focus on the sessions which don’t seem to have been heavily discussed and try to draw a few themes out. For me, the over riding theme that came through was Engagement.

It’s been an interesting week or so in the Chemistry online world. Following on from my musings about data services and the preparation I was doing for a talk the week before last I asked Tony Williams whether it was possible to embed spectra from ChemSpider on a generic web page in the same way that you would embed a YouTube video, Flickr picture, or Slideshare presentation.

Regular readers will know I am a great believer in the potential of Web2.0 tools to enable rapid aggregation of loose networks of collaborators to solve a particular problem and the possibilities of using this approach to do science better, faster, and more efficiently.

Image from Wikipedia via Zemanta Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality: There is a problem at the core of this. For someone to pay for access to the results, there has to be a monetary benefit to them.

How do we actually create the service that will deliver on the promise of the internet to enable collaborations to form as and where needed, to increase the speed at which we do science by enabling us to make the right contacts at the right times, and critically; how do we create the critical mass needed to actually make it happen?

Image via Wikipedia There have been a number of interesting discussions going on in the blogosphere recently about radically different ways of practising science. Pawel Szczesny has blogged about his plans for freelancing science as a way of moving out of the rigid career structure that drives conventional academic science.