In his new book Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky argues that in the last 50 years many of those living in industrialized countries have seen a dramatic increase in free time, paired with better education and a higher standard of living. But a very large part of that free time or cognitive surplus is now routinely used to watch television, a passive activity that makes us a consumer rather than a participant.

Google announced last week that they will stop further development of Google Wave, and essentially shut down the service by the end of the year. Some of the more exciting parts of Wave will be reused in other Google products or – since many parts of Google Wave have been made available under an Open Source license, in products by other companies.

Reference management is a frequent topic on this blog. The last few years we have seen both a large increase in the number of available tools, but also big changes in how we use reference management software. But for many of us the first reference management software was Endnote. I first used Endnote as a medical student in 1990 (Endnote Plus at that time, published by Niles Software), and I’m still a regular user.

Flipboard is a personalized social magazine for the iPad. The free application was released on July 22, and instantly created a lot of buzz. Because of the overwhelming interest, they had to create a waitlist for the personal features and I could only sign up for and start using them a few days ago. Flipboard is a true iPad application, it would not work the same on a laptop computer or mobile phone.

The last few days we have seen a number of blog posts reflecting on the pros and cons of science blogging networks. Bora Zivkovic last week announced his departure from scienceblogs.com, and in his must-read post reflected on the history of science blogging (A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem). Richard Grant on Saturday wrote down his thoughts On Nature Network.

About a year ago I wrote a blog post about how to use Web 2.0 tools for a journal club (Recipe: Distributing papers for a journal club). Although reference management tools such as CiteULike and Mendeley can be used for journal clubs, discussion features are often more of an afterthought. At the time I therefore recommended FriendFeed.

Earlier today I attended the fabulous Innovations in Reference Management workshop in Birmingham organized by Owen Stephens from Open University. Owen has written some blog posts summarizing the sessions almost in real time. You also find a good number of interesting tweets under the hashtag #irm10.

Last week I attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago. For my work it is the most important scientific meeting of the year, and it is also by far the biggest with more than 30.000 participants. Blogging is a great way to report from conferences, and for me FriendFeed is the best microblogging tool to do that.

Social media and privacy have a complicated relationship, as using social media implies giving up at least some privacy. And the value of a social networking site is directly related not only to the number of users, but also the extend of personal data that the site has collected.

Next month I will participate in the Innovations in Reference Management event organized by Owen Stevens from the Open University.