I just returned from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Orlando, with approximately 30.000 participants one of the largest oncology conferences. Like other conferences of this size, the experience can be overwhelming, but thankfully the organizers are getting better every year in using technology that helps in finding the most interesting sessions.

Google Wave is a new tool to communicate online and collaborate and was announced today at the Google I/O conference. Google Wave is not only a product, but also an open protocol that anyone can use to build his own wave server.

Most of us find, store and sometimes read scientific papers electronically. Although abstracts and full-text papers are usually available as web pages in HTML format, PDF is clearly the preferred format for storing and printing papers. But publishing scientific papers in electronic form obviously requires more than providing the content in HTML or PDF format.

Reference managers are essential tools to read and write scholarly papers. In the last few years we have seen both a number of new reference managers (most of them web-based), but also a trend for the established reference managers to gain social networking features. More choice is great, but it also creates confusion about the right tool to use.

Scientific papers are submitted to a journal as word processor files, usually in Microsoft Word format. After the paper is accepted for publication, the journal takes the manuscript and translates the text into a format that is better suited for publication online and/or in print. XML and the NLM DTD – a set of XML schema modules – have evolved as the standard data format for this purpose.

Richard Grant, who needs no introduction here on Nature Network, has just moved to London to start a new job as information architect for Faculty of 1000. I took this opportunity to ask Richard a few questions not only about Faculty of 1000, but also about his role in the company and future plans for the service that they have in mind. 1. Can you describe what Faculty of 1000 is and does?

I've recently asked a few questions about author identifiers for scientists. Here are the results (based on 48 responses). The results are also available as .xls file.

Now that we have a number of online reference managers to choose from, I thought it would be interesting to look at their popularity – both in absolute numbers of visitors and the in changes during the last 12 months. Online tools such as Compete allow everybody to do just that, and their basic functions are free to use.

The scientific articles we write are uniquely identified by Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). Many people believe that we also need unique identifiers for the authors of those articles. Some of the arguments why author identifiers could be very helpful are found in this interview with Geoffrey Bilder, this Researcher Identification Primer, and this FriendFeed discussion.

A recent Nature News article by Geoff Brumfiel (Science journalism: Supplanting the old media?) has stirred up many interesting discussions about the relationship of science blogging and traditional science journalism. Good starting places to follow these discussions (and engage in them) are Technorati, Nature.com Blogs and FriendFeed. Science blogging extends, but also threatens traditional science journalism.