THINKeEXTENSION

I have written about Slideshare as an eExtension tool before, it’s free, it’s wonderful, and you should try it.  Scratchpads is a very interesting Web2.0 application that incorporates Social Media and Biodiversity Informatics.

Below is a Slideshare presentation about Scratchpads by Vincent Smith, a cybertaxonomist from the Natural History Museum, in London. The presentation was originally given at a meeting of the Governing Board (GB15) of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Arusha, Tanzania. Vincent is no stranger to Slideshare and believe it of not, he knows Roderic Page, I blogged about Rod and his prolific eExtension output earlier this week. See what a connected place the Social Media landscape is, I didn’t know anything about these guys a few weeks ago. Now I know both by tracking keywords that are important to my industry (ringing bells … see eExtension Tip #2 – Use Google Reader to stay on top).

Anyhow without further ado here is Vincent’s presentation.

Scratchpads are an easy to use, social networking application that enable communities of researchers to manage, share and publish taxonomic data online. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered free to any scientist that completes an online registration form.

• Taxonomy
• Classifications
• Phylogeny
• Phylogenies
• Literature
• Bibliographies
• Images
• Custom Data
• Specimens
• Specimen records
• Maps

Users control who has access to content, which is published on the site under Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license.

Data added to a Scratchpad are automatically classified and grouped around a taxonomy that is supplied by the users. This is optionally supplemented with information from high quality web accessible databases, to automatic construct content rich web pages about any documented taxon. Currently these sources include Genbank, GBIF, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Yahoo! Images, flickr and Google Scholar. Source: scratchpads.edu/about

Why not head over to Slideshare now and make up of all those powerpoint presentations you have sitting around. Or if you are biologically inclined head over to Scratchpads and give it a try. Leave us a comment if you try either I’m sure other THINKeEXTENSION readers benefit from you sharing your experiences.

Tags: eExtension, Slideshare, Scratchpads, Biodiversity, Social-Media