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A similar post was posted at bbgm
The session on Communicating Science with Video at the Scifoo Lives On section on Second Nature (SLURL) was loads of fun. There were three presentations. I kicked things off by talking about Bioscreencast, then Jean-Claude gave a talk about how he has leveraged YouTube for recording experiments, and finally someone from SciVee gave a talk on SciVee. Berci live blogged the whole session.
Picture credit – Berci Mesko via a Creative Commons license
The session was rather well attended. Both Hari and I were able to attend. I hope we gave people an idea of what Bioscreencast is all about and what we are trying to do. It was really cool to have the SciVee folks presenting as well and to find out a little more about the SciVee backstory. There were some excellent questions as well. One of the people in the audience, a social scientist (I forget the avatar) suggested that we host flash animations as well. That’s a wonderful idea and it fits into our philosophy of allowing people to learn via the web. The barrier to creating flash animations is a lot higher, so we don’t expect too many, but looking forward to our first one. In general, I am looking forward to questions and screencasts from today’s attendees.
I also put up a modified (longer) version of today’s presentation on Slideshare.
That was the question that arose after the announcement of SciVee. One only needs to see recent blog posts across the life science blogosphere to realize there there are a number of video-related life science sites that have arisen in a very short period of time. For convenience, I am going to stick to three, since they fill, at least in my mind, complementary roles in the life science video landscape. It also helps us figure out where Bioscreecast fits in the life scientists arsenal.JoVE to my mind is the most ambitious project. Being able to capture experiments (visual experiments) with high quality production is no easy task, but having met Moshe and Nikita recently, I think they can pull it off. The challenge is always going to be on the user end. If we are at the tipping point, people are going to become a lot more comfortable opening up their labs to a video camera. If nothing else, SciVee and JoVE suggest that video is a viable form of communicating formal science.Which brings us to Bioscreencast, and why I think there is a ton of scope here. Screencasts are easy to do, especially compared to other forms of video. In theory, all you need to do is turn on a video screencapture software app and do what you need to do, with the one caveat that recording a narrative at the same time is usually a good idea and probably the one thing that needs some thought prior to starting the screencast recording. We see ourselves as more of an informal user generated site, where the power comes from diverse content uploaded by people with different backgrounds. We all have something to share. Hopefully people will choose to share their software chops on Bioscreencast.Video is just hitting the tipping point in mainstream consumer usage, where more and more people are spending their time uploading material to YouTube, creating content and hosting it on Brightcove or Blip.tv, or like I do, Kyte.tv. In the world of science, there are a number of people, some listed here who have developed platforms that enable those who are interested to take advantage of the tangibility and immediacy of video. The future is now!!!
Over at bbgm, I have a post about SciVee, a new service from the NSF, PLoS and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The new service allows scientists to publish video podcasts in support of published work. This is big on many fronts; the organizations involved alone validate everything we’ve believed in here at Bioscreencast, and slowly, video for scientific content and online communication around scientific works, whether published or user generated in our case is going to continue to grow.
Bioscreencast.com got picked as an Editor’s Pick at Yahoo Gallery, and was the featured pick for a while. As you might guess, that made us all very proud of our star developer.
