The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has recently introduced a feature that I strongly dislike. The post describing this feature (Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge... states: What this means is that, whereas in the past a search in BHL would only turn up content actually in BHL, now that search may return results from other sources. What's not to like?

Following on from my previous post on BHL apps and a Twitter discussion in which I appealed for a "sexier" interface for BHL (to which @elywreplied that is what BHL Australia were trying to do), here are some further thoughts on improving BHL's web interface. Build a new interface A fun project would be to create a BHL website clone using just the BHL API.

Matt Yoder (@mjyoder had a Twitter conversation yesterday about phylogeny viewers, prompted by my tweeting about my latest displacement activity, a 2D tree browser using the tiling approach made popular by Google Maps. As part of that conversation, Matt tweeted: Well, Matt's imagination has gone into overdrive, and he's blogged about his ideas. This issue deserves more exploration, but here are some quick thoughts.

One of the things I'm enjoying about the Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB is the chance to play with some ideas without worrying about breaking lots of code or, indeed, upsetting any users ('cos, let's face it, there aren't any). As a result, I can start to play with ideas that may one day find their way into other projects. One of these ideas is to use quantum treemaps to display an author's publications.

This week seems to be API week. The Encyclopedia of Life API Beta Test has been out since August 12th. By comparison with the Mendeley API that I've spent rather too much time trying to get to grips with, the EOL API release seems rather understated.

I've been playing a little with TreeBASE II, and the more I do the more I want to pull my hair out. Broken URLs The old TreeBASE had a URL API, which databases such as NCBI made use of. For example, the NCBI page for Amphibolurus nobbi has a link to this taxon in TreeBASE.

Lately I've become more and more interested in moving data off my machine(s) and into the cloud.