Today is the world’s first Open Access Day . It aims at broadening awareness and understanding of OA. The approach is to make as many people as possible to blog today on the topic, possibly answering the following questions:
- Why does Open Access matter to you?
In my case, where pretty soon I’ll have no support from a large institution, Open Access means ability to do research. OA is a vital help to small or underfunded research groups.
- How did you first become aware of it?
Internal policy of my former employer required that all results should be published in OA journals. BTW, it didn’t change since then.
- Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
Ability to do research and to innovate shouldn’t be inhibited by access to knowledge and data produced by publicly funded research institutions.
- What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?
I do publish in OA journals (four out of five publications I have so far are OA).
See more OA Day entries at FriendFeed Open Access Day room.
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Freelancing science 
Timestamped FriendFeed activity – really public “profile”
Accidentaly, I have found a simple way for obtaining a time stamp for each entry and comment any person with publicly available lifestream makes on FriendFeed (except “Likes”, which do not seem to be timestamped at all). Activity of semi-randomly choosen person during the day (summarized over couple of weeks (!)) is shown below:
FriendFeed usage during 24 hours, summarized over couple of days.
While relation between AM and PM periods is correct, time-zone is manually shifted, so it’s more difficult to guess who’s this activity is (but it’s not Robert Scoble if you want to ask). What does it tell? Basically, this person does not close FriendFeed window for the most of the day. Additionally, there’s a period of the day in which “catching-up” has place. Nothing interesting so far? Original data has much more details. It is possible for example to collect information when during the day particular person usually watches videos on YouTube. Guess – is that during working hours? 🙂
Ability to get that data for couple of weeks back without any trouble (I didn’t need to track this person’s activity for such period) was kind of disturbing. I knew it’s very simple to start tracking my habits, but I wasn’t aware of the fact that it’s also easy to see what I was doing over the last three weeks. Do you think it makes a difference?
Posted by Pawel Szczesny on January 29, 2009 in Comments, Visualization
Tags: activity tracking, Blog, FriendFeed, RSS