How many iMechanica users are on Twitter?  And how many are on Twitter with professional contacts? 

 I started to use Twitter about 4 months ago in a completely social, non-professional context.  As a personal (expat-focussed) blogger, I started to notice that I was
catching blog posts in my Twitter feed before I would see them in my
feed aggregator (Bloglines).   Twitter has emerged as a different sort
of feed aggregator, as well as a provider of information. 

Nature recently favorably reviewed a new self-published book, based on a blog , by a "female physical sciences professor" in the US.  While the overarching theme is clearly about being a female in a male-dominated world, the writings on the blog (and in the book) are in many places general and provide lots of good advice and anecdotes about acadmic life.  The book is available as a download on Lulu and is highly recommended reading, not to mention an interesting web-2.0 phenomenon.

I stumbled across this interesting blog post yesterday concerning an upcoming course on medicine via web 2.0.   It appeared quite interesting from several perspectives: first, medicine is often associated with being behind the times on technology but this all looks pretty current, secondly it may be the most comprehensive listing of topics I have seen where web 2.0 is applied to a single discipline, and finally it made me wonder what more we could do with mechanics via web 2.0 beyond just the current features that drive iMechanica!

While preparing a talk on iMechanica , I came across the following video "Information R/evolution" by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kansas State University.  This thought provoking video echoes a recent comment on "The future of knowledge?"

Enjoy!

Abstract: Web 2.0 refers to a collection of second generation web services, such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, and Really Simple Syndicates (RSS) feeds.  While the first generation web (Web 1.0) is about linking information available online, Web 2.0 emphasizes online collaboration and sharing among people.  These new web services bring up new opportunities to innovate how we conduct research and education. We report the preliminary explorations of engineering education exploiting Web 2.0 services, through iMechanica (http://imechanica.org). 

I stumbled on this article in the NY Times "The Ultimate Distance Learning" (free registration required to view) about the establishment of University distance learning activities within the Second Life online community.