All of these words are ringing in my ears the way noise does when you get back from a loud rock concert. I'm back in my hotel from the 2007 Science Blogging Conference and want to say that I had a great time meeting everyone. I can't thank Anton Zuiker enough for putting the conference together. It was one of the rare times, actually the first time, where I could have long conversations with people who understand both the scientific life and the dot-com life. There are sooo many great science websites out there and new ones that are coming out, which I will write about here soon.
I think many people would agree that the Web 2.0 'revolution' is over in the sense that it's no longer new and the leaders (MySpace, YouTube, etc) have already sold out. There is a lag in the science world, which is still catching up in a lot of ways and just now adopting many of the technologies surrounding social networking (a la MySpace - see now Nature Network) and user-generated content and news ranking (a la Digg - see now The Scientific Debate). I think both Nature Network and The Scientific Debate are going to be very popular, but these products themselves are not new, they're just readaptations of existing technologies for a specialized market. This, I'm sure, is probably going on in many other fields and represents the second wave of the Web 2.0 boom with many opportunities for niche players. Call it Web 2.1.
I wonder what next year's Science Blogging Conference will be like and whether it will be about blogging at all or will cover a range of technologies. Something tells me that blogging will be so ubiquitous, so over, a year from now that it'll probably have to be named something else. We had an impressive number of media companies represented at the conference, for example, PBS Online News Hour, The Scientist, The New York Times, and Lulu publishers. It will be interesting to see if the conference moves more in the direction of new online media or in the direction of new online technologies for scientists (like wikis), or if it simply grows and tries to cover both.