I moved into digital product management in 2007. I had no formal training, and for much of the last eight years I’ve been learning on the job. There are a huge number of resources out there, great lectures, books, conferences, blog posts. In this short post I just want to reflect a bit on what I’ve learned on this topic through direct personal experience. I continue to learn, and my thinking continues to evolve, so this post is more of a look back, than a look to the future. ... (more)

I’m on a mission to clear out my instapapper backlocg, so I’m going to be blogging olds rather than news. There was a nice piece in the Atlantic last month talking about how Google could provide a better social experience by activating it’s latent networks, rather than mimicking facebook. But think about Scholar as a latent social network. Each paper contains its own social network that Google already crawls. Every bibliography is filled with other social networks. ... (more)

I’m starting to draft this post on the train on the commute to my new job at eLife. After almost two years I’ve taken the decision to move on from Mendeley. They were without doubt the two best and most challenging years of my career to date. Working in a start up is an amazing, frustrating, enlightening, energising and rewarding experience. No single post can do justice to that time, and each time in the past weeks that I have drafted this post in my head it has had a slightly different timbre, so take this for what it is, a reflection in a moment. ... (more)

The awesome Rod Page has a great post on utilising Mendeley as a bank for citation data. He recommends that projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library should build on top of the kind of infrastructure that we have already created at Mendeley. I’m a big fan of this as an idea, and indeed one of my goals for Mendeley is for us to create a system that makes it easier for others to build great tools for researchers. ... (more)

Martin Fenner asked me to comment on Mendeley’s relationship with the Citation Style Language, so I thought I would pop up my thoughts on the blog too. Martin’s post below is the original message that I sent over to him. Hi Martin, thanks for getting in touch and asking about Mendeley’s relationship with CSL. There are basically three aspects of citation styling that I’d like to discuss, the first is about Mendeley’s involvement, the second is about the use of citation styling in the community, and amongst publishers, and the third is about how we identify things in academia, and how we format those identifiers. ... (more)