Henry started it by banging on about his iPad. Somehow the subject of blogging came up and I mentioned the BlogPress app, so here I am testing it out. I used it once on MT4 but this is my first go on WordPress.
Seems OK so far…
Second, what exactly is this thing called Quora?
I came across it on Twitter earlier in the week and, like a social media addict, signed up straight away. Quite a few other people seem to have done the same thing. I’m not sure any of us knows what we’re doing.
The basic idea is that it’s a Q & A site. It seems a bit more serious in intent than Twitter (which is often used for Q & A or ‘crowd-sourcing’, as public querying is called by the little blue bird). Quora will check the grammar and intelligibility of your question before allowing you to post. So watch your language.
I’ve not done much yet but the very first question I posed elicited a useful answer. Following a comment I made on Henry’s post about the lack of a decent molecular graphics application for the iPad, I asked on Quora if anyone knew of one. I am keen to be able to display protein structures on my touchy tablet. I wasn’t too hopeful since I’d already searched on Google but within an hour two people had pointed me to CMol.
I haven’t had a chance to play with the program yet, so i will reserve judgement. But I can already tell it’s more useful than the somewhat limited Molecules app.
I took a picture to give you an idea (don’t fret about the details – it’s just the cluttered innards of a poliovirus protein):
And thirdly, late this afternoon I was very pleased to learn that one of my posts from last year was selected for inclusion in Open Laboratory 2010 – the anthology of the best writing on science blogs. The selected post recounts my first sighting of Jupiter.
Far out.
Just saw your inclusion in scio11 – well done sir!
Stephen – I have resisted it so far, but Quoea does sound interesting. Brian Kelly wrote an assessment of iit recently.
Cheers Henry – though I think you mean Open Lab… I’m not off to #scio11.
Thanks for the link Frank – I will be keeping an eye on Quora. Jury still very much out.
Frank – I’ve had a chance to look at Brian Kelly’s piece on Quora. It’s quite interesting but he seems to be coming at it from the developer community point of view – comparing it to Stack Overflow (which I’m not familiar with).
However, he does link to a much better and more general post by Robert Scoble, which asks Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?. Worth a look.