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 someone with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective lets us know what they value.  So yes, all those 250 year-old articles on hops written in GERMAN are actually pretty neat.  For the rest of you, here’s what she was referring to.

Read Amy Stewart’s article at Garden Rant

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:

  1. Matt is very interested in GIS, and his review features some forward-looking statements from me regarding EOL’s interest in this area of work.  What we actually deliver - and when - are under discussion.  If you have an interest in participating in this discussion, contact me directly via this blog, Twitter, or any other means at your disposal.
  2. The concept of an “e-biosphere” merits more discussion.  Stay tuned for announcements regarding this topic.

Read Matt Ball’s review at Spacial Sustain

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:

  1. Rod has been a member of the extended EOL family since the project began back in 2007, and we pay close attention to what he has to say, even when he’s being a sceptic.  Actually, especially when he’s being a sceptic.  
  2. Achieving what Dr. Wilson called for in his 2002 article and 2007 TED Wish speech is still very much in our sights.  Getting there will be a journey of many steps and multiple releases.  With this recent release, our design goal was to build a product that was dramatically more engaging, accessible and personal than the prior version - in part because that’s what the majority of our users were asking for, but also because those are prerequisites to some of the requirements that Rod would like to see us address.  I won’t go much further than that because I’m not a believer in making roadmap promises before they’ve been fully vetted and approved.
  3. My colleague Dr. Cyndy Parr, director of the EOL group responsible for acquiring content, wrote a very thoughtful response to Rod that you can read in the comments associated with his article (link below).
  4. He’s right in saying that we’re still working to get the social elements of the new site tuned.  We’re especially focused on how comments get propagated, how collections are managed and shared, and how users can find what they want in all of those.  And yes, we’re even looking at various social media integration points, including OAuth integration.  So there’s plenty of room for progress.  But… I think we nailed the core mechanic of EOL Collections, which we had to do in order to launch.

Read Rod Page’s review at iPhylo

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 manipulable about those ideas; they spawn from reading papers, from the ideas of others.  EOL provides a level of control that allows systems to be constructed that plead for further explanation.

— Jeremy Bruno, 9/5/11 

Thoughts:

  1. The collection Jeremy created in the course of his review is now the #4 response when you do a Google search on the words “monotypic taxa”.  I’ve noticed other EOL Collections being very highly placed in search results as well.  Try “beautiful seamonsters”.
  2. At the end of this review Jeremy says “EOL suddenly becomes a very interesting resource for science enthusiasts, educators and writers.”  This makes us very happy, as this was a design goal.  
  3. A review of some of the (great many) collections created since launch shows that collections are catching on quickly with the enthusiast and educator community.  To see a complete list of EOL Collections, click here.

Read Jeremy’s review at the Voltage Gate blog on Scientopia.org

Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) blog.  Please visit us at http://www.eol.org.   If you have questions regarding EOL, or if you would like to make a request or provide feedback, please leave us a message using the “Questions, Requests and Feedback” link at the top of the page. We will be posting a list of known issues associated with EOL to this blog in the coming days, as well as an overview of planned enhancements.  You will be able to access these via links found on the right-hand side of the screen. This new version of EOL is the product of many months of planning, development and collaboration, and is based on requirements provided to us by EOL users around the world.   We hope you will enjoy using it as much as we do.
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Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) blog.  Please visit us at http://www.eol.org.  

If you have questions regarding EOL, or if you would like to make a request or provide feedback, please leave us a message using the “Questions, Requests and Feedback” link at the top of the page.

We will be posting a list of known issues associated with EOL to this blog in the coming days, as well as an overview of planned enhancements.  You will be able to access these via links found on the right-hand side of the screen.

This new version of EOL is the product of many months of planning, development and collaboration, and is based on requirements provided to us by EOL users around the world.  

We hope you will enjoy using it as much as we do.

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 Encyclopedia of Life.

Once this new version launches, please come back to this blog for the sort of information you’d normally expect to get from a blog: news, ideas, commentary, the occasional photo, letters from our users, feedback from staff, etc.

And of course, thank you for supporting the Encyclopedia of Life.

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.  Again.  There will be other opportunities to review everything, but this is the dress rehearsal.

Yesterday we were in the middle of our weekly D&R meeting (for “design and requirements”) when our colleagues on the other end of the Skype in Washington, DC hollered.  At first we thought a large bug had flown into the room.  Seconds later, we learned there had been an earthquake.

“Can we get back to the call?” we asked, safe here in Woods Hole.

Two minutes or so later, the building rocked gently back and forth.  Outside I watched the trees do the same.

That was the end of the D&R call.  So all of us will know exactly where we were and what we were doing when the Semi Big One hit Virginia.

The next big adventure is getting all of the translation strings loaded up and making sure they’re complete.  Hold on to your hats, kids.

(PS: I actually did an interview with a reporter from a Cape Cod newspaper on this story - not the state of EOL, but about what we were doing when the earthquake struck.  How about That.)

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 feedback proves that you paid attention.  Even nicer.

We’re working our way through your responses - which has resulted in a very robust punch-list that we’re looking to complete prior to launch.

A few of the high-level issues we’re working on:

1. Make the classification box on the taxon page overview tab more useful (some would say “understandable”)

2. Improve the virtual collections workflow. 

3. Distinguish between your Watchlist and your Collections.  More on that later.

4. Resolve duplication and sort issues with the various update feeds.

5. Localization issues, primarily making sure we have proofed sets of strings for our core supported languages.

6. Fine-tuning the mobile CSS.

Of course, there are a whole raft of interface refinements on the way, as well as some functionality that was not part of the beta.  More on those soon.

If you have some specific feedback you’d like to make sure we’re addressing, drop me a note using the link at the top of the page.

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