Earlier this month I took part in a workshop:The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on Various Applications, at the Edinburgh e-Science Institute (eSI) this event was part of a thematic programme looking at

The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on e-Research Infrastructure, Applications and Users.

The workshop was attended by a selected group with varying interests in different application areas, and the common glue was the Web 2.0 underpinnings. I was surprised about how interesting the sessions where even when the underlying disciplines were a long way from my own.

There were others there who were much more proficient with their use of technology than I am. Andy Turner (from Leeds) was what I thought was live blogging, in fact he was building his wiki on the fly which provides an excellent record of the event -see http://portal.ncess.ac.uk/access/wiki/site/~a.g.d.turner%40leeds.

On the other hand I was among the Twitterers present, the hash tag #research3 was used and archived at http://www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/research3.

I talked about the social networking side of the LinkSphere project, from the original ideas, through the iterations of the site to where we are today. I had picked out some of the user comments and statistics, and these led to quite a lot of discussion about how well the general academic interacts with Web 2.0 technologies. For instance many of our respondents never or rarely used Web 2.0 tools (from lists including social networks, blogs, wikis etc), while many described their role on social media as contributors.