I have been exploring social networks for scientists lately and I have just been looking at BioCrowd. I like it. I heard about it via a message on one of the groups I belong to in LinkedIn and have noticed that it is one of the media partners of the upcoming E-Patient Connections 2009 conference.

The fact that BioCrowd is helping to put on that conference endeared BioCrowd to me because I am planning to attend and I think it could become a really important gathering given the rise of the patient empowerment/user generated healthcare movement, which really does need a conference of its own in addition to the extensive discussion it receives at the equally useful Health 2.0 conference.

I had looked and written about ResearchGATE last week and it is striking how much BioCrowd surpasses it in sleekness of look and the extensiveness of the Web 2.0 functionality BioCrowd offers compared to the fairly lackluster offerings of ResearchGATE in that respect. Perhaps that is because ResearchGATE is geared toward hardcore researchers, whereas BioCrowd markets itself to bioscience professionals (such as those in more lucrative lines such as pharmaceutical marketing and investment banking) and therefore may have more money at its disposal for Web site development spending.

In any case, BioCrowd is a handsome site.

Interestingly, for those of us who are enamored with the lively social networking in the sciences that one finds in the Life Scientists room of FriendFeed and FriendFeed’s Science 2.0 room, it is indicative of the fascination and usefulness of both of those rooms and other science and tech-related rooms in FriendFeed that BioCrowd features the FriendFeed Logo prominently on its homepage:

… and significant that it has done little in FriendFeed at all other than announce the launch of BioCrowd itself:

After all, why would you devote time and manpower to building up a presence on a rival site?

I do like BioCrowd. It has the all the requisite Web 2.0 bells and whistles that ResearchGATE notably lacks. The stuffy among us might snort pompously about the presence of video clips and podcasts. But such things do have value and do edify and educate.

For instance, I am not a neuroscientist. But I do have an intense interest in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I had a vague understanding of apoptosis and its connection to ALS. So I actually did stop to watch the video about the process that is featured under the heading, “Fresh Content From BioCrowd.” That was a surprisingly compelling bit of filmmaking and I found myself actually getting actually quite teary thinking of what devastation apoptosis can wreak upon good, kind people and watching that video made me read more about the process and to wish that high school science teachers across the country would show that clip to their classes and thereby, perhaps, get kids interested in the incredibly fascinating world of molecular and cellular biology which in such clips can seem as exciting and as beautiful as underwater and planetary exploration.

That is the mark of a good Web site — it educates and stimulates emotional responses and thought. BioCrowd does that — and now I will get to its equally worthwhile professional purposes.

One marvekous feature of BioCrowd is the “Twitters” feature of “BioCrowd Buzz.”

I love Twitter so was intrigued by that feature (and it looks to be an excellent vehicle to increase one’s own social media profile).

I glanced over the entries and noted this one:

Now just to illustrate the power of BioCrowd as a social media tool: I read Alex Savic’s tweet. I viewed the video he recommended and found it absolutely outstanding and became even more impressed with Kru Research and delighted that BioCrowd is helping to put on E-Patient Connections 2009 and helped plug that in a bit of free viral marketing by tweeting about that superb video overview (which features a bit about PatientsLikeMe. which is so important for the well being of ALS patients). I also wanted to know who Alex Savic is so found him on Twitter (@alensa) and am now following him there and via his Twitter account checked out his blog and saw that he is presenting a paper at Medicine 2.0, Toronto, which I am also doing (about my beloved ScanGrants — gotta get my trademark plug of that into this column) and so will be much more motivated to attend his presentation, having already read about him via BioCrowd:

In the respect of enabling me to quickly learn quite a bit about Alex Savic in just a few minutes (and I liked the personal note to him from BioCrowd co-founder Clifford Mintz, “Hi Alex, Thanks for joining. We share a common passion biosimilars!”), BioCrowd stands up well to rivals such as LinkedIn and FriendFeed.

I liked the page of podcasts and videocasts (but I didn’t see any of the latter):

… and as I write this I am listening to the podcast of the interview with the remarkable Young Turk of Medicine 2.0, Bertalan Mesko. The interview was well conducted and the choice of Mesko as a featured personage a good one, given what an up and comer he is in so many fields: Medicine 2.0, medical search and the e-patient movement. The interview was well conducted and interesting.

This page has potential, but many of the podcasts were several months old and didn’t open in a separate window but gobbled up my one window, forcing me to open a second one to find BioCrowd’s homepage again.

But it is nice to be able to apprise oneself of sources of podcasts that one did not know of before and those who publish such series as these:

http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/

http://beta.microbeworld.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=37:meet-the-scientist&layout=blog&Itemid=155

… might want to arrange for placement of their feeds on BioCrowd. The more visibility for such useful resources the better.

The extensive BioCrowd Buzz on the homepage makes for rather interesting reading. Here was something useful for those interested in making their mark as scholars as they think tenure, tenure, tenure:

The potentially useful page on upcoming conferences (I am deeply into conferences) was a disappointment because it took far too many clicks to get to the page that contained that info I was intrigued by only to see that the conference was sold out and had occurred some weeks ago, in any case. Too bad that this useful feature is not more carefully monitored and cleaned up periodically.

This being a member-driven community, there is a bit of tiresome, non-science-centered fluff that one doesn’t find at the more sober ResearchGATE. Here are some of the listings for G, for instance:

• Genetics
• Genomic and proteomics
• Genomics
• Glioblastoma
• Glioma
• Golden Retrievers
• Golden Rice
• Golden retrievers
• Golf

Golf is not what I looking for when in a site about biomedicine.

But for all that fluff, there are some golden nuggets here. For instance, I have just been away from this post because I have been off in Twitter reading some very good blog posts about Open Science and academic publishing that I came across because I clicked around in BioCrowd and came across this man:

Because I wanted to determine what sort of people are members of BioCrowd, I had clicked on the link on the homepage Institution/Company:

And decided to see if anyone from Elsevier (a good gauge of gravitas in science matters and therefore of social networks in the sciences) was a member and Cesar Sanchez is and so checked out his Twitter page (@TwistedBacteria). He had excellent tweets about Science 2.0 (good for Elsevier for getting into the Science 2.0 swing of things by allowing staff to tweet freely about academic publishers, even if some of the tweets point to blog postings that excoriate outfits like Elsevier) such as one about the upcoming ScienceOnline2010 conference. Thus, I now have learned about some smart people in Science 2.0 and Medicine 2.0 via BioCrowd. Way to go, BioCrowd.

The Bioresources page could use some major beefing up. Good start, but pretty thin. That is the trouble with trying to maintain pages dependent on member input — slothfulness is the default fallback of most human beings.

All in all, I would say BioCrowd has potential and excels at leveraging Twitter in its own offerings.

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