Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators
[runtime: 00:46:05, 21.1 mb, recorded 2007-07-05] — Who's linking to this? — As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay is applying web 2.0 principles to the realm of science. His projects include: Connotea …
Context & Ripple Effects
Jon Udell has kept up his interviewer's beat since announcing his move to Microsoft in December 2006 — this IT Conversations session with Timo Hannay shows him using that access to pull publishing insiders into view for a developer audience. Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature Publishing Group, is the rare traditional-publisher executive building web 2.0 tools rather than just writing about them.
First-order effects
- Hannay's project portfolio — Connotea among it — gets explained directly to Udell's tech audience, extending Nature Publishing Group's visibility beyond its core scientist readership.
Second-order effects
- Competing scientific publishers face a choice between matching Nature's social-bookmarking and community tooling for researchers or ceding that workflow layer to it.
Third-order effects
- If publisher-built web tools become embedded in researchers' daily habits, scientific publishing drifts from selling journals toward owning the tagging, sharing, and annotation layer around research.
The trend: Scientific publishing is absorbing web 2.0 mechanics — social bookmarking, sharing, annotation — as publishers like Nature Publishing Group build researcher-facing tools themselves.