Dark Matter Sheep Some ramblings of a musical astronomer

Dot Astronomy – the Leiden Experiment

I've just returned from Leiden (its in the Netherlands - which incidentally, is not the same as Holland). I was attending a conference called ".astronomy" (or "dotastronomy" because people and web browsers often don't notice the little full stop), which was hosted by the very generous and capable staff of the Lorentz Centre. The venue was excellent, providing us with our own offices for the week, meeting rooms, very fast (and easy of access) wireless internet, and cheeky but friendly staff.

The philosophy of .astronomy is using new media (which mostly, but not exclusively, means the internet) to 'do' astronomy. That's not just astronomy research but also astronomy outreach/education. The first conference was the genius idea of Rob Simpson (of orbiting frog fame) and has been further developed by a team of cheeky helpers.

I've only recently come to respect Twitter as a medium for news updates on a massive scale. This week really cemented the concept for me, as a fast, and mostly reliable way to let everyone at the conference know what was going on as it happened. Using the hash tag system (where you include in your tweet # followed by the tag name, in our case #dotastro) we could find out about what magic the various working groups were up to, interesting quotes and points from the talks, directions to pubs, and whenever someone said something inappropriate.