Hari Jayaram just listed my blog as one that makes him think. Keeping the meme going, I'll list 5 that have had an impact on me. 1. Beth's Second Life Beth Ritter-Guth has been a huge inspiration for me and she is the main reason I pulled the trigger on getting involved with Second Life for my teaching and research. We have collaborated on many other projects involving social software and new approaches to education - Google her name for many more goodies. 2. Chem-bla-ics Egon Willighagen has been instrumental to the cheminformatics community.

Joanna Scott just wrote a nice little review of what is going on at Nature Island (slurl) on Nature's Nascent blog since her return from the American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago. The Blue Obelisk Cemetery, where I give my students quiz races on Fridays was featured (only possible through help from Beth and Eloise - thanks again!).

Fans of Open Source Science (or just the open source concept in general) should take a look at Assignment Zero. Jay Rosen writes on the About page:

Inspired by the open-source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It's a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who choose to participate. The investigation takes place in the open, not behind newsroom walls. Participation is voluntary; contributors are welcome from across the Web. The people getting, telling and vetting the story are a mix of professional journalists and members of the public -- also known as citizen journalists.

As I mentioned earlier, we were interested in getting our compounds screened by the Developmental Therapeutics Program (DTP) at the National Cancer Institute. The first entry is now done and from what I understand it will be 8-10 business days before we get a request for the compound after they check for uniqueness. This is good timing because it really is time to gather up all of the isolated and characterized compounds in UsefulChem on one page, which is now linked on the left navigation bar on the wiki.

The April 23, 2007 Chemistry and Engineering News article on the Social Software in Education symposium at the American Chemical Society spring meeting in Chicago has come out. I gave a talk there on using blogs and wikis to teach organic chemistry. The article is a pretty comprehensive report on the session and does a good job of summarizing the key technologies currently being tried without much hype. Podcasting, vodcasting, tagging and wikis were discussed from teachers and librarians using them in different ways.

Earlier this week, I was contacted by Daniel Zaharevitz, Chief of the Information Technology Branch of the Developmental Therapeutics Program at the National Cancer Institute. He is also involved with the NIH Roadmap Molecular Libraries Initiative. We had a very interesting talk about Open Science and what kind of further impact it could have in drug development. Lets just say that we are on the same page on this issue and I'm really impressed with what Dan is trying to achieve. The first thing we are going to do is start shipping the compounds we make for an automatic screening of 60 cell lines for tumor inhibitory activity.