The Laboratory Website and Video Awards by the Scientist!
Posted by attilachordash on October 9, 2007
Here is a classical web story told in links: a niche blogger got an idea and tries to outsource it, it is popularized by other bloggers, then goes mainstream with the help of a science journal, grows over little blogger’s head and get realized by another powerful science institution.
That’s what happened with my unofficial lab website competition idea, which was featured in Nature back in May.
Let me introduce you to the Laboratory Website and Video Awards or LaWVAs (pronounced like “lava) hosted by The Scientist. (Disclaimer: I am a consultant to The Scientist on the LaWVA project and a member of the judging panel.)
The algorithm is as follows:
1. readers nominate their favorite academic or industrial lab websites
2. editorial team will review the nominations and provide up to 30 outstanding sites to the panel of judges
3. panel of judges (e.g. Elizabeth Kerr from Apple Inc. amongst others) will then carefully review these nominations, ranking their top choices in each category (design, usability, content, community), as well as making a selection for our “Judging Panel’s Best of the Web” award.
4. Once the panel of judges has completed their review, it’s time to turn the voting back to you. The winning sites as selected by the editorial team, judging panel and the readers will be announced in this December.
Wow! Let’s make together a web-savvy laboratory culture!
Deepak said
Attila
Way cool. I remember the original post quite well. Good to see someone picking up on it. Some good nominations up there already. If nothing else, I hope some labs realize how terrible their websites are.
The Competition of Laboratory Websites « ScienceRoll said
[...] October 9, 2007 Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Web 2.0, science. trackback A fellow blogger, Attila Csordás at Pimm, has come up with an idea of a competition for laboratory websites. This is a great web 2.0 story! [...]
Euan said
Cool!
It’s a shame that you can’t tell which are kept up to date (assuming that anybody nominated will hurriedly do a spring clean of their content) which is another problem with lab sites…
Maybe that’s secondary compared to actually having something good up in the first place, though.