Here are two interesting postings regarding science and the “new web”.

First, how do most labs view the use of social media?  Not very highly, if you believe the results from a recent survey by Lab Manager Magazine:

Laboratories are at the forefront of research and analysis. But when it comes to communication, they are followers rather than leaders and can be very slow to adopt innovations. The use of social media is a case in point, as a recent survey of nearly 200 lab managers revealed. There are six good reasons for labs to explore the opportunities offered by the social media…

This could also be part of a bigger event, which some say is the demise (or maybe transition) of science 2.0.  As David Crotty argues in “Not with a Bang: The First Wave of Science 2.0 Slowly Whimpers to an End“:

The Nature Network launched in 2006, organized around researchers in Boston, then went global in 2007, five years ago. It perhaps offered the high-water mark in terms of the irrational exuberance by publishers and other companies in building big Web 2.0 tools for scientists. For a time, the widespread adoption of these tools seemed inevitable, and business models were an afterthought when investing in revolutionary new technologies.

Five years on, reality has reared its ugly head, and, as is often repeated here at the Scholarly Kitchen, culture has trumped technology. It turns out that what works well for some cultures does not immediately translate into success in others. Rather than focusing on the needs of the research community, much of what passed for Science 2.0 was an attempt to force science to change — to make the culture adapt to the tools rather than the other way around.

Do we see either of these phenomena in our day-to-day interactions?