The article is E Is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evolutionary [E]Journal by Gerry McKiernan The Serials Librarian, 1541-1095, Volume 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 293 – 321.

McKiernan has very generously, helpfully self-archived the piece here.

There are several reasons I want to write about McKiernan’s piece.

First of all, the article is an excellent overview of what publishing an article in a scholarly journal has entailed over the years, how things stood in 2002 and how things were progressing back then.  I wish I had been assigned this article in library school and recommend it to library science instructors.

I was particularly struck by the wording, “…the journal is one large object made up of article objects, individual request objects, a server object, solution objects, page objects, and reference objects, and other objects that interact with each other, the network and the hardware environment to create the journal that is delivered to each reader…In this model, the reader is considered an object that dynamically participates in the creation of the journal.”

Pretty prescient of McKiernan and the authors he cites, End-User Customized Chemistry Journal Articles Steven M. Bachrach,* Anatoli Krassavine, and Darin C. Burleigh J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci., 1999, 39 (1), pp 81–8.

I had not heard of Steven Bachrach before and it really is fascinating how much of the work in leveraging the power of the Web for Science 2.0 is being done not by info professionals but by chemists such as Bachrach, Jean-Claude Bradley, and Antony Williams.

Librarians and information scientists are major beneficiaries of the work the chemists and other basic scientists are doing vis-à-vis transforming the very basics of how science is done and what forms scientific communication and scholarly publishing are taking.

Thank you, Gerry McKiernan, for instance, for introducing those of who live in the world of librarianship and the info sciences to the quite brilliant Dr. Bachrach who seems to have no trouble excelling in his field of chemistry while in his off hours helping to transform the very basis of the cornerstones of the edifice of scientific communication: the journal and the article. Kind of depressing, really, what people like Bachrach, Williams and Bradley accomplish in so many fields while the rest of us struggle along trying to do even one or two fairly useful things in our own, less impressive grooves!

The second reason I wanted to highlight McKiernan’s article is that it is an excellent example of the value of self-archiving as a way of sharing one’s scholarly production with greater audiences than may be subscribers of a particular journal. Thanks to McKiernan’s proactive actions of a) self-archiving his article so that it is easily accessible as a PDF to all comers and b) alerting various audiences to his article with a link on where to find it more of us can learn about important topics.

For instance, I noticed a message from McKiernan himself in one of the electronic discussion lists of The American Society for Information Science & Technology ASIS&T: a good lesson on the merits of unabashed marketing of one’s work. I wish more librarians would do the same—don’t be shy, group! More of us should request from scholarly publishers (and this goes for everyone—scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the sciences, etc.) the right to self-archive or deposit our work in institutional repositories.

And this brings me another reason I want to highlight McKiernan’s act of self-archiving. It is actually to the benefit of the journal and thus to the publisher of it.

For instance, I am not a serials librarian but I am now interested in the journal in which McKiernan’s article first appeared and have been perusing the web site of the journal, The Serials Librarian and almost certainly would not now be considering subscribing had I not been able to download and read McKiernan’s article and to think, “Hmm, I am not a serials librarian. But this is a pretty thought-provoking article. I wonder what else is in that journal…”

And I came across some quite interesting stuff in the abstracts, like this one about the article, “What Color is Your Paratext?” and was edified there to read this quite interesting passage:

Geoffrey Bilder from CrossRef discussed the problem of how to identify trustworthy scholarly information on the Internet. This problem is exacerbated by readers’ growing distrust of intermediaries such as publishers and librarians, by the fact that the Internet lacks the traditions that have developed in scholarly communication to ensure trust, and by the sheer amount of information now readily available. Paratext is understood as anything outside of a text that sets expectations about that text. In the past, paratext, for example a publisher logo, provided important clues as to the trustworthiness of information. In the context of the Internet, Bilder suggested creating a meta-brand to serve as paratext. CrossRef is developing a meta-brand called CrossMark that would certify for the reader that the online content to which it is attached has been vetted by processes of scholarly review and is therefore trustworthy.

That snippet made me think, “How sloppy of me to have gotten all the way through library school just a year ago and not really to have grasped what CrossRef is.”

Therefore, I checked out what it is exactly.

This is a rather long-winded (but you are all used to that with me, no?) way of saying that allowing for self-archiving is good for readers, authors who want to be read and the journals that allow for it. It also shows that journals can be quite effectively promoted by the generosity of the editors who allow people like McKiernan to self-archive. Good for Taylor & Francis, Routledge and Informa (so many imprints these days!) for allowing me to get a look via McKiernan’s article for free of what kinds of things appear in The Serials Librarian and thereby better gauge the value of a paid subscription to it. Clever of them! And, by the way, kudos to Iowa State University Library for sharing the esteemed McKiernan with the wider world of library and information science.

This is all quite fascinating for those interested in how publishers are faring in a rapidly changing online world in which both the public and policymakers are scrutinizing the existing cozy, rigid realm of sci/tech and medical publishing and not liking what they see.

I have written about DeepDyve’s innovative “Research. Rent. Read.” model before and have since then chatted on the phone with DeepDyve’s CEO, William Park. I had been planning to write about DeepDyve’s interesting alliance with CiteULike but wanted to first attend ScienceOnline2010 because I knew that there was to be a session there called, “Online Reference Managers”
and that one of the firms to be discussed at it was to be CiteULike.

And here I am going to digress into matters of nomenclature. CiteULike itself uses the wording, “free service for managing and discovering scholarly references” and “scholarly bookmarking services,” whereas at ScienceOnline2010 we saw the wording, “Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information.”

Soooo, take your pick. I think I am going to stick with social bookmarking as that seems the most common term, and it is easier for me to type the word “social” than the word “scholarly.”

In any case, I am glad that I attended that session at ScienceOnline (and if I were a vendor or startup that had anything to do with software in the sciences I would send a huge contingent to next year’s conference, as there will be many opportunities there to get a feel for products that the online science community needs) because it gave me a better handle on social bookmarking in the sciences. Oh, rats—maybe I should have stuck with the term scholarly bookmarking. So many words for the same thing.

I am actually somewhat grateful for my sloth since then and for not having written about the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance (which is not a partnership per se, as far as I can tell) because there have been several developments at DeepDyve in the interval that I can now discuss in this one post, having finally roused myself to a state of modest activity.

Let us first examine what makes the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance interesting and what might enable the two firms to actually make some money from it.

Here are the pros at this stage as I see them.

First of all, Mr. Park has long argued that there is a substantial pool of researchers (and I would argue a vast unrecognized group of laypeople who have a driving interest in a scientific subject whether as a hobby or because they are activists on an environmental issue, say, or are afflicted by or love someone with a dire illness) who have need of scholarly articles but who have no access to resource-rich libraries and so have to either pay whopping sums (say $35 a pop for maybe seven pages of text), prevail on the good will of those who do have access to such resources (and those so beseeched may feel uneasy about complying with such supplications given how confusing and occasionally draconian copyright rules are on sharing scholarly articles) or do without the information.

DeepDyve’s pitch to publishers is that this is a huge market and that sci/tech publishers (many of which are professional societies that make money from their publishing operations and which have simply ignored non-members or disdained them as dilettantes or ignoramuses unworthy of attention) are better off trying to entice them by risking peeks at articles online for 99 cents in the hopes that the lurker will so like what he sees via his non-reproducible, non-downloadable peek that he will pony up for the actual PDF or otherwise downloadable version.

The trick for both CiteULike and DeepDyve is to persuade the publishers that they are better off trying the 99 cent peek gambit than to remain aloof from this group and continue their present ways of making money: squeezing libraries until the pips squeak (not a sustainable strategy given cost pressures in academia at even the richest of institutions, let alone cash-strapped ones), charging ever more for personal subscriptions, and assuming that the general public is willing to continue forking over $20-45 for articles when they are becoming aware of the Open Access movement. This awareness and concomitant disgruntlement are fueling the drive for public access to taxpayer-funded research. In the current anti-corporate, tar and feather the price gougers public mood DeepDyve could actually provide some cover and heretofore untapped revenue streams for the publishers willing to partner with DeepDyve (and DeepDyve is making major strides there—more on that below).

Let us stick with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance for the moment. Another plus for the publishers that they should take note of is its potential as a way of advertising the existence of its offerings to educated (who also tend to be affluent ones) readers.

For instance, if you do a search in CiteULike you often will come up with journals you had not heard of before. Now, if I could take a series of 99-cent peeks at various articles in a periodical without even getting up my from desk (as opposed to, say, emailing asking for a free sample copy which I may or may not be granted and which may take weeks to arrive in hard copy and which may be several years old and thus not good advertising of the value of the journal) I might be impressed enough to subscribe to the journal itself or simply go ahead and purchase the full text of several articles.

The risk for the publishers, of course, is that I will do nothing but peek, get the gist and never do much more than that. But at least they would have gotten maybe $5 out of me that day, which is better than nothing.

Another plus for the publishers of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is that as more and more libraries cut back on journal subscriptions even researchers that are affiliated with universities will find that they can’t get what they need from their own institutions and may start using the 99-cent peek and either download the full article (a win for the publisher) or try to get the full article via their library’s interlibrary loan service (which is still a win for the publisher in that some interest has been generated in the journal, which means some library somewhere will continue subscribing to it).

A minus for the publisher of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is the rather inert state of scholarly bookmarking services (and spam problems at Connotea, for instance), so whether they would truly get much business from hooking up with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is another question. (For instance, I just tried out CiteULike again for really the first major go at it since I set up my account way back in 2005—but then I am not a heavy duty scholar).

Likewise, for CiteULike the value of the relationship with DeepDyve can be realized only if DeepDyve can demonstrate that it has many big-name publishers on board.

For example, I tried a search just now in CiteULike on my usual search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Because DeepDyve has no relationships with publishers that feature the huge number of journals in the neurological sciences that, say Springer (which, as the sponsor of CiteULike, you would think would come on board with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance) or Elsevier do, I saw not a single icon for the 99-cent peek.

But the fact that I could not see the icon for my search is really an argument for the value of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance to publishers. I mean here I was, doing a search. My debit card is in the room. I could easily have ordered several articles if I had had immediate access to a peek and possibly sizable sums of money could have been extracted from me just now.

Think about that scenario, publishers. Do you really want me to have to try to find your stuff in Google or hope that I know enough to use PubMed and get to your toll access sites from there and then hope that I will simply hand over $35 or so without a peek or peep?

And DeepDyve is starting to forge a pretty impressive roster of blue ribbon publishers among its offerings and is approaching critical mass in terms of raising the comfort level among prestige publishers with its “Research. Rent. Read.” model. It now has relationships with major scholarly publishers such as the MIT Press, and the University of California Press, and with professional societies like the American Institute of Physics, the Radiological Society of North America, and the Association for Computing Machinery. Not bad.

I am quite puzzled, actually, as to why this quite interesting company is not getting the attention it merits in the library and scholarly publishing blogosphere. Perhaps librarians aren’t writing about it because they can usually, via professional networks and personal relationships, get their patrons what they need. Open Access people are not writing about it because they are philosophically opposed to cash changing hands when it comes to research information.

But let’s talk ugly truths here. We are not in a world where everyone has access to library resources galore. And not everything is Open Access yet. There are large numbers of people who need scholarly information and should have an affordable option for getting it and publishers should be aware that there are ways to make some money is some instances rather than none in many and that 99-cent peeks can lead to years of individual subscriptions.

William Park is an endlessly creative thinker. DeepDyve started off a nice little search engine. That in itself was interesting and worthwhile. He is now creating new models for the entire sci/tech publishing industry and making what had been a rather tired Web tool (social bookmarking) interesting again. Gotta hand it to the guy–there are second acts in American life.

But I would like to introduce you to the wider health technology and Open Science communities given your ability to recognize important technologies, tools and trends in the area of scientific and scholarly communication and your skill in explaining their use and recognizing their potential for many tasks. You are an educator and explicator supreme.

I envision as readers of this interview not only medical librarians and sci/tech librarians but anyone in the healthcare industry who needs information from time to time—and that is basically everyone in healthcare. Therefore, readers of this interview might include physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, healthcare administrators, healthcare informaticians, those in the fields of biomedical/clinical research, health information management and so on.

Moreover, I think that much of what you have to say will be of interest to the increasing numbers of empowered patients, known as e-Patients, most notably exemplified by people like e-Patient Dave and by readers of the site e-patients.net, which is run by the Society for Participatory Medicine.

E-Patients are a new breed of patients. They are sophisticated, determined seekers of healthcare information and medical librarians are going to encounter more and more of them and you are just the man to help those two groups get to know each other.

Finally, I would like to introduce you to those interested in the area of Open Science and scholarly communication in general. People like Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Antony Williams, John Wilbanks, and Bora Zivkovic are changing the very nature of how science is done and how research results are disseminated and I would like to get your views on how what they doing is going to affect us in the field of healthcare farther down the pipeline. Could you introduce yourself as if you were addressing this wide audience?

Hi, my name is Dean Giustini; I am a Canadian academic health sciences librarian and blogger living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. I am a biomedical librarian at University of British Columbia’s main teaching hospital in a new building called the Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre. My main responsibilities are to provide library, research and instructional support to UBC faculty and students at Vancouver General Hospital; I am also responsible for managing the onsite staff and collections of monographs and journals that support the academic and clinical activities onsite. Academically, I teach two courses at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies; 1) a new course on social media and 2) a traditional course on health librarianship.

My main extracurricular interests are related to web technologies in medicine. I enjoy providing information services to hospital personnel and teaching information literacy skills to medical students, but I enjoy collaborating with physicians using social media and Web 2.0 applications. I am a traditionalist librarian in my views but try to find the potential in digital interaction and web technologies in my work as well.

I first became aware of you around 2004-2005 when I was new to the field of medical librarianship and learning about how the Web was affecting how medical people acquire information. You were one of the first to address this topic in a very public and influential way with your 2006 article in the British Medical Journal, “How Web 2.0 is Changing Medicine.” Could you please tell us a little about what led to the publication of that piece, your reaction to the reactions to it and what has surprised or disappointed you vis-à-vis developments in the years since it was published?

That’s an interesting question. First of all, I was quite amazed by the interest that the BMJ web 2.0 editorial got – and how how often it is cited. It is an opinion piece not research. I had no idea it would be important when I wrote it. It was easy to write because I believed that social media would be important for all of us. And I could see how digital interaction using social media would be important to collaborative science. In retrospect, I can see why web 2.0 was controversial; even now biomedical librarians are debating the importance of web 2.0. The field of medicine and science has moved on from the squabbles around what ‘web 2.0’ means and whether it exists but perhaps the phrase ‘social media’ is more appropriate than the 2.0 suffix in discussing the technologies of the era.

In any case, I keep waiting for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to create a MeSH for web 2.0. Since the BMJ editorial, Eysenbach has defined medicine 2.0 and the 2.0 suffix is used for everything including for all kinds of marketing purposes. The most important aspect of web 2.0 is that the tools help us to build networks and take advantage of “Metcalfe’s Law” – the network effect – for collaboration. Although physicians are building silos around their networks in private spaces patients are very openly sharing information about themselves. I doubt there is much digital interaction between the two groups yet; I only know what physicians and patients tell me that they are starting to enjoy using the tools. I am not sure that the changes we are seeing in how patients and doctors communicate online comes close to what we see when patients interact with each other. It’ll never be equivalent because doctors operate within very different parameters of practice.

In that article you said, “For me, the promise of open access in Web 2.0—freed of publishing barriers and multinational interests—is especially compelling.” Where are we now in that respect?

When I wrote that line about the synergy between web 2.0 and open access I was referring to the publishing potential of social media and OA journals. Much of this potential remains unrealized. I have been disappointed by the poor performance of wikis versus the surprising growth of open access. Since the editorial, I got involved in Open Medicine – one of Canada’s open access journals. We are making progress and NLM accepted us recently for Medline (PubMedCentral) indexing. It’s been a long, arduous path, but we did it in two years.

You said in that piece, “The rise of wikis as a publishing medium—especially Wikipedia—holds some unexamined pearls for the advancement of medicine. The notion of a medical wikipedia—freely accessible and continually updated by doctors—is worthy of further exploration.” What do you think, then, of the Medpedia Project, other players such as Google’s Knol, and the fact that Wikipedia is experiencing an exodus of editors.

I am happy with the development of HLWIKI Canada (formerly the UBC Health Library wiki). But as a team of writers and health librarians, we are only beginning to use the wiki as a collaborative space and platform. One of the problems is that I write most entries. I continue to believe that medical/physician and librarian-moderated wikis can play a role in biomedical publishing but some wikis have simply not caught on – and no where near what we have seen with Wikipedia. I’m not sure what the reasons are, but PageRank in Google has helped Wikipedia move up to the top of search results. These factors have an impact on whether your wiki will be seen and used.

Occasionally, I check out what is happening at Google’s Knol. I read an article recently and compared it with Medpedia. Despite the support Medpedia has, I am not sure how it is doing. When I go to the site I am left with a feeling of ‘so what’ – can’t we do better? AskDrWiki and Ganfyd are good wikis but again they are not very well-known. I worry that the ‘free’ remix culture espoused by Chris Anderson and Lawrence Lessig has hit a wall of some kind and that people are tired of contributing with no recognition. Perhaps this is Wikipedia’s problem too. At some point, folks bail out and try something else.

Do you see wikis as less useful for medicine than was first thought or are there are wikis run by those in certain medical specialties that are thriving and that it is only the general interest ones that seem to be hitting a wall? How is the Open Medicine wiki project going, for instance, which you wrote about in the post “Can Wikis be Used as a Publishing Platform in Medicine?”

The Open Medicine wiki has suffered from the same fate as the wikis we’ve mentioned above. The main issue is that maintaining a wiki is a lot of work and you need an army of writers, editors and volunteers. The wiki is a labour of love –I do a lot of promotion of it whenever I can. I cannot contribute to the Open Medicine wiki because I am not a physician. I think that the OM wiki is worth a try, but I wonder about its staying power. I often have trouble getting docs to use PubMed properly, so how can I convince them to contribute to building a wiki? It’s uncertain.

What do you see as the future of a user-generated content in medicine in general, whether by patients in such online communities as PatientsLikeMe or by medical people for each other in gated communities such as Sermo or by the quite interesting attempt to enlist both practitioners and patients in the form of audiences and contributors in the Journal of Participatory Medicine.

User-generated content where social tools are used in medicine will continue to evolve in ‘specialized niche areas.’ I worry about these niches because they engender ‘bias.’ Typically, we friend people we agree with and ‘block’ those we don’t agree with; this prevents disagreement. You mention the consumer health social space PatientsLikeMe and the physician social networking site Sermo – generally viewed as two successful examples of social media. The last report I heard, AMA had severed its relationship with Sermo because it did not have enough say about the direction of Sermo. When it started, Sermo was an ‘adverse reporting’ system and it morphed into a social networking site. The lesson is that medicine is still monolithic and apt to change in time. The veil of secrecy cannot be removed overnight; patriarchy will change over time. The ‘wedge’ or tipping point for social media will probably be in the area of online consultations and finding ways to compensate doctors for their time.

Getting back to the matter of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Participatory Medicine, could you comment on one of the most interesting articles in it, “In Search of an Optimal Peer Review System?”

What, for instance, is your reaction to that article given that it is by Richard Smith, someone closely associated with the British Medical Journal, the very periodical that published your own article on the Web and medicine? What do you think of Smith’s comments, for instance, “I think that it would make much more sense simply to publish the paper — on a university website or in an electronic journal with a low threshold — with my comments and those of the other reviewer and let the world decide what it thinks. That is anyway what happens in that many peer-reviewed papers disappear without trace after publication, some are torn to pieces, and a few flourish and are absorbed into the body of science.” And, “Web 2.0, the social web, may hold the key to the future of peer review. Peer review will become the job of the many rather than the few, and we know that the many can solve problems better than the few…”

I enjoy Richard Smith’s ideas and thinking about web 2.0. He is on the Editorial Board of Open Medicine. His views are very progressive. He is trying to make his profession more transparent and accountable to patients. When a high profile person discusses peer review and publishing papers on accessible websites for all to see and critique –I listen. There is a downside to open peer review – poor bibliographic control. What Smith may or may not know is that researchers publishing openly on the web would create chaos – how would we find anything? How would studies be comprehensively indexed? This is a big problem of the information age. When you take advantage of anytime, anywhere publishing — you also fragment the medical bibliography and make it more difficult to organize.

And on a related topic, do you see the recent moves by Harvard and MIT to mandate Open Access policies as momentous vis-à-vis mounting a genuine challenge to the power of the big publishing houses and creating a workable model of Open Access publishing that other universities could follow, thereby creating a world in which scholarly publishing and clinical research could indeed be freed of the fetters of the tyranny of antiquated publishing practices that hinder the advancement of science and impede efforts to help patients farther down the line? Or are the publishers simply too powerful and the forces of tradition vis-à-vis peer review, and tenure and promotion practices simply too entrenched for radical change? Are the Harvard and MIT policies the tipping point for an Open Access world or noble but ultimately fruitless endeavors? Are they harbingers of real change that will affect the day-day-day lives of clinical researchers and, therefore, farther down the line, medical providers and medical librarians?

In an ideal world “Why can’t we all get along”? Universities, multinational publishers and institutional repositories such as PubMedCentral should be working together and building partnerships. I am surprised a public-private hybrid model has not emerged. Academic librarians should take the lead and offer to host journals using open journal systems (OJS). For unprofitable journals, or those with small readerships, publishers should think about good corporate citizenship and help struggling society and university publishers to publish journals.

Now, let’s talk techno tools. The name of your blog, for instance, is The Search Principle blog and on Twitter you categorize yourself as a “bio-medical librarian, renegade, techno-enthusiast.” Let’s parse that a bit. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? What, for example, is a bio-medical librarian versus a plain old medical librarian? A renegade in what respect?

I am all three: a health librarian, a medical librarian and a biomedical librarian. I answer to all. I wrote that on Twitter and on my blog because I had to come up with something. I’m not too much of a renegade, but I admit I won’t tolerate inequities and I stand up for others who cannot stand up for themselves. Perhaps this is what I am trying to do in my profession: stand up for our field, for excellence and high standards.

And as to being a techno-enthusiast, what are your top five favorite Web or search tools and what should we look for techno-wise in the coming year for medical librarians and vis-à-vis Web users in healthcare generally?

Keep in mind that I have to answer your questions from my perspective as a Canadian. Finding as much Canadian content as I can – medical evidence, statistics and local consumer health information — is central in my work. The websites or search tools that I cannot do without are: 1) The BC Health Guide 2) Public Health Agency of Canada 3) Health Canada 4) The Cochrane Library and 5) Medline OR PubMed. I also think that WorldCat is important as are Bing and Google Scholar (and all three have Canadian content).

Do you regard Wolfram|Alpha as a flash in the pan or as something truly promising? What do you think of Rupert Murdoch’s pushback vis-à-vis Google? Dumb move on his part? Is Google the default and any moves to try to shift Web users to Bing doomed from the get-go?

Wolfram Alpha has a lot of promise, but it may in fact be a ‘flash in the pan.’ For laypeople, and non-scientists, it’s not easy to use. We want it to behave like our print tools like the Merck Index and the CRC Handbook to behave – with intelligence and intuition. The only problem is that searchers do not know how to extract the information from it or how to form answerable questions.

As to Murdoch and his rejection or challenge to Google, I think it’s fine. Google needs competition. The more players we have in search the better. I don’t think Bing is doomed and don’t think it will be easy to dethrone Google. Ten or eleven years ago, no one thought Yahoo could be unseated as the most important search tool. The whole area of web searching continues to get attention for the money – but it too will stop flowing if the tools do not produce usable results or become cumbersome to use.

Getting back to Twitter, what are your favorite tools in it, how has its advent changed your work practices, whom has it connected you with that you had not known of before and how do you see it being used effectively by librarians, clinical researchers and front-line clinicians? Can you give us specific real-world instances of its use in clinical settings?

We need a whole conference to discuss Twitter properly. I will say that it has evolved since it was first developed – because we, the users, have seen its potential applications. Twitter suits me (and my needs) on a number of different levels: first, I’m a snoop so Twitter satisfies my need to listen to other people and to access information and gossip in real-time. Second, I enjoy hearing about other people’s working lives, projects and thoughts on world events. Finally, I enjoy myself more when I have information sent to me. Danah Boyd speaks eloquently on her blog about how she was intimidated by backchannels while she spoke at a conference. But Twitter is useful to all kinds of clinical people; I hear some psychologists use it to remind patients to take their medication. For anyone who needs to send tweets in the future, you can use a range of clients to send your ‘network of contacts’ messages at selected intervals.

Whom do you regard as the best tweeters in medicine and librarianship? Any additions to your list here?

I will definitely be adding to this list in 2010. Stay tuned.

Do you see Twitter as eclipsing blogs per se or do you find that Twitter drives traffic to blogs? Do you foresee the RSS button on blogs and Web sites being replaced by Twitter buttons? Or is RSS the perfect tool for leveraging the power of Twitter? Who are your favorite bloggers?

All of the tools you mention such as blogs and RSS feeds are affected by other social media. But I don’t see any tool that you have mentioned being eclipsed or replaced. Blogs are central to our culture now. Twitter has changed some of our behaviours and writing less than 15 words or 140 characters; it too is part of our culture. I like Twitter because there is power in concision and regular posts to your network. All of this is a part of defining your influence in the spaces of web 2.0. But none of that will stop me from blogging which is integral in my work.

You provide here a very useful overview of social media tools and I was interested in this comment, “RSS feeds can potentially replace traditional email lists, reducing email overload.” Have you indeed noticed that some email lists are disappearing or are people simply using tools such as Feed My Inbox
to use RSS a way to create email alerts? Are RSS readers really gaining traction among the general public or are they passé as far as the masses are concerned and are they falling out of favor even with the info-minded cognoscenti?

The level of general interest in RSS feeds and aggregating tools like Bloglines and iGoogle has been disappointing. There are physicians and other health professionals who do not know what “RSS” means or why it might be useful. The dominant form of communication is still e-mail. I maintain accounts on a number of aggregators and have discovered new aggregators such as Netvibes and Ning. The latter is a tool that allows you to create your own network – and it is very easy to use. But its adoption in medicine is minimal.

Thank you for your time, Dean.