For those of you who, like me, weren't at the "Frontiers Of Biodiversity Informatics and Modelling Species Distributions" held at the AMNH in New York, here are the videos of the talks and panel discussion, which the organisers have kindly put up on Vimeo with the following description:

Yesterday I posted notes on Web Hooks and OpenURL. That post was written when I was already late (you know, when you say to yourself "yeah, I've got time, it'll just take 5 minutes to finish this..."). The Web Hooks + OpenURL project is still very much a work in progress, but I thought a screen cast would help explain why I think this is going to make my life a lot easier.

Here's the video of my talk at the NHM (courtesy of Vince Smith). Going Digital - by Rod Page from Vince Smith on Vimeo.

Elsevier have released this video about the challenge, featuring a few of the contestants. I couldn't get my act together in time to send anything useful, and having seen the 16 gigabytes song (full version here), I'm glad I didn't -- there's just no way I could compete with Michael Greenacre and Trevor Hastie.

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.