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We have the pleasure to announce that the BeNeLux Bioinformatics Conference will be held in Luxembourg on 12 and 13 December 2011.

Luxembourg will host this event for the first time, and we look forward to welcome you all.

We are pleased to inform you that the BBC11 website with key information on programme and participation is now online: www.bbc11.lu

You can also follow updates on Twitter (@BBCLux).

And if you want to share something about our conference, our official hashtag is #BBCLUX.

Looking forward to receiving your abstract submissions and having your participation at BBC11!

The BBC11 Organising Committee.
Francisco Azuaje, Michael Heymann, Daniele Moes, Daniel Struck, Anne-Marie Ternes, Anke Wienecke-Baldacchino

More and more companies like Klout, PeerIndex or Twitter Grader evaluate your impact on social networks. If you have a public twitter, facebook or linkedin account you will be scored by these companies whether you like it or not. So I think it is sensible to investigate what this scores represent and how they might be used by third parties.

I could think of three different types of users interested in such scores:

• The human resource department of a company gathering information about candidates. These scores could impact the decision if the candidate gets the job or not. I hope they will take into account that these scores are more interesting to evaluate the marketing skills of people then their capacity to develop “stuff”.
• Companies “bribing” people with high scores, giving them free samples, invitations or free meals. Hoping these people might influence a lot of other people. The Klout Perks would be an example for this idea.
• Individuals using those scores for different purposes. Evaluating the person they want to follow or searching for “interesting” / influential people on certain subjects. This can amplify the influence of already high scored users and make it harder for newbies to establish themselves.

When you will be using these scores you should also be aware of their limitations:

• The scores can not take into account offline activities. There are a lot of influential people who do not use any online social network or only to a limited extend.
• The scores will only take into account a subset of the available social networks or online activities. So far facebook and twitter is well represented among those services. Linkedin begins to show up on those scores but blogging for example is not yet taken into account.
• Only some of the companies describe the algorithm they use to infer the scores. The implementation itself is not available.
• When the scores get more prominent some people will try to game their scores.
• The score can change at any moment as the company makes adjustment to their proprietary algorithm.

Enough of bashing the social network scores The scores can also be used in a positive sense. You can see them as a feedback loop for your social activities. If you want to improve your influence you are able to get a direct feedback and take action upon it. Remembers me the excellent Wired article Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops by Thomas Goetz.