January 2012
10 posts
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New EOL Podcast: "Sanibel Shells"
In this episode of One Species at a Time, we join serious beachcombers along the high-tide line of Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. These “shellers” come in search of beautiful sea shells, sometimes no bigger than a grain of rice, that are the remains of marine snails, bivalves, and other mollusks. Along the beach and at the island’s Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum, we learn why Sanibel’s shores...
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Announcement: New EOL Species Collections by...
source: Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, Managing Director, Pensoft Publishers
As a next step in its fruitful collaboration with EOL, Pensoft has created two species collections on EOL – Fabulous ZooKeys New Species and Fabulous PhytoKeys New Species. The main aim of this initiative is to bring together and promulgate the scientifically notable new taxa described every year in Pensoft’s journals and...
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Press Release: EOL Expanding at a Record Pace
Increase in Content Partnerships, Growing Spanish-Language Text, Conservation Content, and Images Boost Encyclopedia of Life’s Value to Scientists and General Public
Washington, D.C. – January 4, 2012 – The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) continues to expand at a record pace with the addition of new content and partners. At the start of 2012, EOL provides data on nearly half of all described...
December 2011
1 post
EOL Page Counts Explained
If you’ve been watching the EOL homepage closely over the last few weeks, you’ve probably wondered why the number of EOL “pages” went down from 750,000 to around 700,000 before suddenly going up to near 920,000. I’d like to give you some insight into what this number means and how it is calculated.
EOL has a lot of names (taxa) in it - well over 2 million of them. ...
November 2011
1 post
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EOL Update - Collections
It has been a very busy few months here at EOL since the launch of EOLv2. We’ve been delighted by the public response to the new version and the rapid uptake of many of the new features on EOL.
The most noticeable milestone we’ve just passed is 1,200 collections on EOL - quite an increase over the 20-or-so collections we had at launch.
Many of these are, as we expected, very...
September 2011
5 posts
2 tags
EOLv2 review by Amy Stewart at Garden Rant
I spend a lot of time as a writer trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between the interesting, obscure, and complex work that scientists do—and the rest of us. EOL’s doing that too, and I love them for it.
— Amy Stewart, 9/21/11
Thoughts:
There are a number of aspects of EOL that those of us who work on it everyday kind of take for granted - so it’s nice when...
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EOLv2 review by Matt Ball at Spacial Sustain
The EOL site is about putting life into context, seeing connections and providing the ability to interact with the data. Version 2 of the site improves the connection to educators to engage broader audiences, and snowball understanding. The site makes teaching of biodiversity more accessible, and staying on top of change is a large part of the mission.
— Matt Ball, 9/5/11
Thoughts:
...
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EOLv2 review by Rod Page at iPhylo
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has been relaunched, with a new look and much social media funkiness. I’ve been something of an EOL sceptic, but looking at the new site I think I can see what EOL is for. Ironically, it’s not really about E. O. Wilson’s original vision (doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(02)00040-X)
— Rod Page, 9/14/11
Thoughts:
Rod has been a member of the...
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EOLv2 review by Jeremy Bruno at Scientopia
EOL gets me thinking. [My search] started with one of my favorite animals and quickly became a taxonomic scavenger hunt. I started researching: Just how many monotypic taxa are there? Why are they important? What does the classification say about these animals and their evolutionary history? As a writer, the answers become the building blocks for an essay. Usually there’s nothing...
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August 2011
9 posts
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Welcome to the EOLv2 Press Preview
If you’re reading this, either you are a regular visitor to the EOL blog, or you’ve been given access to the EOLv2 Press Preview site. In either case, welcome.
If you are a member of the press and would like to schedule an interview with members of the EOL team, please send an email to eolv2press@eol.org. We’d be delighted to speak with you about the new version of the...
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Wrapping things up.
I’m back in Woods Hole, MA with the EOL software development team this week. We’re wrapping up the development of EOLv2 with a flurry of documentation, bug fixes, formatting changes and the typical refinements you discover after living with a nearly-complete system for a month.
Tomorrow we’re going to take a nice long tour as a group through the product and review everything....
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What happened to the old EOL blog?
There are many changes going on at EOL in the next few weeks. Today’s task was to change the old blog’s DNS to point you here. Welcome.
The EOLv2 Blog is focused on the work of developing, refining and growing the new version of EOL, which we’ve cleverly decided to refer to as EOLv2.
I am aware that the focus of the old EOL blog was broader. In time, you can expect this...
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The EOLv2 beta is over.
A big thank you to everyone who participated in the beta test and a very big thank you to those of you who completed the beta survey. You Know Who You Are.
The numbers suggest the 159 people who tried out the beta site took their time to explore it quite thoroughly - on average you visited 18 pages per visit and spent more than 12 minutes per visit. Nice. And the quality of your direct...
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EOLv2 beta - Points of Interest
Here are a few pointers to get you started.
To browse the EOLv2 beta site, you do not have to be registered as a user.
To contribute to the EOLv2 beta site, which includes making comments and playing with the new “collections” feature, you need to be registered as a user. It should be pretty intuitive how to accomplish this.
Please note - any data you create as a beta user will not...
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How do I learn about the EOLv2 beta?
Please visit http://www.eol.org/content/page/v2beta and read the entire page. Yes, every word, they’re all important.
All done?
That’s it. Just go to the URL for the beta site found on the page above, and have at it.
We would very much appreciate it if you would complete the EOLv2 Beta Survey, which will be posted to the page above when it is ready - I will also share links to it...
