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Update: I totally forgot about Postgenomic's conference section when I originally wrote this post. So I've added a paragraph at with additional information on this great resource.

Welcome to the sixth edition of Bio::Blogs, or for python enthusiasts: from bio.blogs import *. This edition is the 'conference edition', brought to you from the semi-conductor capital of the world, Hsin Chu. Firstly thank you to Pedro for maintaining the enthusiasm to organise Bio:Blogs, and thank you also to everyone who submitted links, I wasn't exactly overwhelmed, but I haven't actually submitted anything to previous editions, so I can't really complain. But before we begin a quick a reminder, don't forget to register for the First Online EMBL PhD Symposium, it starts Monday.

So each year, we all take advantage of one of the few fringe benefits available in our field: conference travel. Conferences come in many different varieties, from huge, multi track, week long, scientific information orgies with thousands of delegates and bad coffee, to small intimate gatherings in some of the best travel destinations in the world. Yes, the scientific meeting can be a strange beast indeed. Unfortunately there are just too many interesting meetings to attend, and this is where conference blogging comes in. Find out what went on at the meetings you couldn't attend, by reading the blogs of people who did. I'll start with two of the better examples of conference blogging I have come across.

One of the problems that has both delighted and frustrated me in the course of my short career in bioinformatics is data integration. The 3rd International Workshop Data Integration in the Life Sciences 2006, held in Cambridge back in July, was of obvious interest to me. Being unable to attend, I was pleased to discover Roland Krause (of Notes from the biomass) did and that he posted his excellent writeup and impressions of the meeting here. Neil attended a local Australian meeting ComBio, held at the Brisbane convention center in September. You can read Neil's writeup for each day at his weblog (Day One, Day Two, Day Three and Day Four)

Pedro sent along Raik Grünberg's report from the Seventh International Conference on Systems Biology 2006 (Raik is a postdoc in Pedro's lab). Frank from the peanutbutter weblog (why beanutbutter ?) sent in his report on the Second International Digital curation conference. Rick highlights a discussion on 'open data', a term I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more of, along with 'open science'. I also recall that Pedro was lucky enough to attend Scifoo camp, various writups of that event here, here, here and here. Last of the conference reports is my own writeup on Advances in Microarray Technology 2006.

Although not strictly conference blogging, Duncan sent in, a grab bag of semantic web conference related links. First two on the Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006), papers worth reviewing from Clarkparsia and Duncan's own post on nodalpoint 'The Atlantic Web', where he highlights bioinformatics related papers and workshops. Also a post on schema language victory from XTech (RELAX-NG wins of course) and Ora Lassila's post on Semantics 2006 held in Vienna.

So on to the non-conference related links. Neil sent in his entire complement of posts on bioinformatics, there is plenty of good stuff there however I'll just highlight one. Join Neil on a failed bioinformatics experiment, to see if the MCPH1 gene was from Neanderthals? Brian Haugen from new blog Connected Bases sent in his list of bookmarklets to search NCBI resources, very handy. Finally Paras Chopra sent in a link from his blog on virtual molecular biology experiments.

So that's it for Bio::Blogs until January 2007. Thank you everyone who sent in links, for this and previous editions. So who's up next for Bio::Blogs #7 ?

Addendum: As Pedro points out on the bioblogs website Posgenomic recognizes posts that include a special conference tag and includes those in the conference section. So don't forget to add the markup when you write a conference report and post it on your weblog. So browsing the conference section shows plenty more reports, for example The 2nd German Conference on Chemoinformatics report from chem-bla-ics and ISMB 2006 from business|bytes|genes|molecules.