Blog Review: The ‘O’Really’ Blog

The blog reviewed here is the ‘O’Really’ blog. I was first directed to this blog by Hope Leman author of the Significant Science blog (see review here).  The blog is by Duncan Hull, a software engineer at the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Appearance and Design

In order to move through the blog, the reader must move to the bottom of the page and click on ‘next page’. This is a very quick method for getting to recent articles but is slightly trickier for much older articles. There is an outer gray-white graded background and the articles lie on a white background with black font in the main body of the text and blue title font and blue hypertext links. The articles are accompanied by small pictures. Top posts and recent comments are visible on the right hand side of the screen.

Content

The first post I could identify is from May 2006 and which informs the reader of an impressive programme catalogue built up by the BBC in relation to it’s archive of radio and television programmes. The details of the creative commons license used for this blog are also outlined in this initial page. There’s a great question in this article which is can there be too many databases. I thought that Hull’s concept in this article is very creative – the visual representation of bionformatics using familiar solutions (but familiar in another context). This post ‘Who owns science?’ is neat and reflects on the nature of science in terms of various interested groups. There were a few useful links such as this one to chemical entities of biological interest and also a description of the open biomedical ontologies.

Conclusions

This is an accessible blog which covers some tricky bioinformatics topics in a relatively non-technical style enabling Hull to reach a wider audience. There are a variety of article categories ranging from reports on conferences through to a discussion of databases. I found a number of the articles to be highly original, exploring topics in detail and presenting a different spin on familiar subjects.

Twitter

You can follow ‘The Amazing World of Psychiatry’ Twitter by clicking on this link

Podcast

You can listen to this post on Odiogo by clicking on this link (there may be a small delay between publishing of the blog article and the availability of the podcast).

TAWOP Channel

You can follow the TAWOP Channel on YouTube by clicking on this link

Responses

If you have any comments, you can leave them below or alternatively e-mail justinmarley17@yahoo.co.uk

Disclaimer

The comments made here represent the opinions of the author and do not represent the profession or any body/organisation. The comments made here are not meant as a source of medical advice and those seeking medical advice are advised to consult with their own doctor. The author is not responsible for the contents of any external sites that are linked to in this blog.