The BBC web site has an article entitled Giant deep sea jellyfish filmed in Gulf of Mexico which has footage of Stygiomedusa gigantea , and mentions an associated fish, Thalassobathia pelagica . One thing that frustrates me beyond belief is how hard it is to get more information about these organisms. Put another way, the biodiversity informatics community is missing a huge opportunity here.

Last month EOL took the brave step of including Wikipedia content in its pages. I say "brave" because early on EOL was pretty reluctant to embrace Wikipedia on this scale (see the report of the Informatics Advisory Group that I chaired back in 2008), and also because not all of EOL's curators have been thrilled with this development.

Some thoughts on the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life. I am being deliberately critical. This is a high profile project with tens of millions of dollars in funding, lots of people involved, and is accompanied by some of the most overblown hype in organismal biology. In a sense I think EOL has set itself up by over promising and under delivering.

The first release of the Encyclopedia of Life is officially live today. I have promised to be very good...

The Encyclopedia of Life web site is up, together with some rather breathless publicity and this cool movie. Of course, it's all vapourware just now. I'm involved in some of the informatics in an advisory role. It will be interesting to see what happens. Let's hope that the fate of EoL will be different to that of the similarly ambitious All Species. Oh, and then there's SpeciesBase... For some reaction see Slashdot.