Introducing the Bioinformatics Knowledgeblog

Last week (21st June), a small group of bioinformaticians gathered in a little room in the basement of a building on the campus of Newcastle University, and quietly bashed out 17 articles about their discipline which now form the basis of the Bioinformatics Knowledgeblog.

The majority of these articles are tutorials, covering everything from large data integration suites like Ondex and cloud/grid computing infrastructure to metabolic modelling and some of the many facets of Ensembl.

We spent most of the day writing articles, and after about 4 hours dedicated to this, almost everyone had a post ready to publish (the advantage of short tutorial style articles is they are quick to write). By the end of the day all of the participants had published at least one piece, and many of them were reviewed on the day too (of the 17 articles, 10 have at least one review). The blog has also received short reviews from people who did not participate in the write-a-thon.

The blog has made a reasonably successful start, garnering around 1,400 page views in its first week, thanks to some positive Twitter traffic on the launch day, and a nice post on the Inside-R blog, cross-posted in a few places.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the workshop participants, who worked so diligently to produce such an excellent resource on the day. We would also like to invite contributions from other bioinformaticians who think they have some tutorial material, or similar, that they would like to reach a larger audience, or if you have an idea for a short article that you would like to see hosted with similar material. All knowledgeblogs are made available under a CC-BY license, and we will provide every article with a DOI. If you have a contribution to make, contact admin@knowledgeblog.org.