Representing Booles' Rings at Science Online 2012

At the end of January, I'll be at Scio12! Science Online is that super awesomesauce (un)conference where all the hipster science bloggers hang out -- and also those fantastic little companies working on the future of doing science on teh internetz (tm).

As a science-blog lurker, I read the blogging coverage of Scio11, getting not just a little jealous. It seemed to attract a great crowd and a very positive atmosphere. This year, I finally "applied", not only attending but actually representing two projects I'm involved in -- Booles' Rings and Mathblogging.org. I almost missed the opportunity because I hadn't been reading as many science blogs as I used to, instead reading more and more mathematical blogs for our Mathblogging.org Weekly Picks.

Speaking of which, only thanks to Mathblogging.org did I read about their shortage of math related topics in time to contact one of the godfathers of scienceblogging, Bora Zivkovic. The wonderful Maria Droujkova from the Math Future group will be there, too, but that's about it. It's a bit of a shame; I know the name does not imply it, but I really would have liked to have seen MathOverflow represented since that's a math related net-thing way ahead of the scientists for a change. Oh well, next year.

Now Science Online is an unconference -- no talks in the traditional sense, but a focus on discussions (which, incidentally, would seem a very sensible approach to mathematics conferences really). I'm giving two tech demos, one for each project. Those will be very short (I'm designing for 5 minutes given my tendency to babble) and hopefully I'll be able to make enough sense for people to ask questions and offer their opinions.

Now that the year is coming to an end, I'm getting more and more excited -- I'm thinking about the demos in earnest and there are all those little things Sam and I want to fix before Scio12...

I'll keep you updated here and I hope I can count on your feedback if I get around to preparing something I can put up here (lots of ifs there...). Of course, I'll have my first attempt at tweeting a conference -- we'll see how that goes ;)