I’m happy to report that the initial testing phase of the features of this new database has been completed, and I am putting together the final version of our interface both on the front end and the back end. The whole system will work within the Biofortified blog posts and hasn’t necessitated dipping into our extensive war chest. But we will need a little bit of help from you.

Readers will be able to browse and search on the basis of:

• Crop studied
• Type of study (nutritional/feeding/basic genetics/etc)
• Funding (independent/corporate)
• Peer-reviewed or not
• Findings (positive/negative/ambiguous)

On each page, we will have:

• Complete, linked citation (including Pubmed author links)
• Abstract
• Specific funding sources
• Impact factor summary
• Our own summary of the findings and significance of the study
• PDFs when possible (open access, future permissions, etc)

There were a couple other ideas we tossed around such as the study location and special areas that display the title of the journal and link to it (in addition to the links in the citation), but that is making it a bit complicated and we’re trying to keep it simple. If there is some information about these studies that you would really like to see included in this database, please let me know in the comments, as coding is ongoing! We hope to have it online and ready for entries at the end of the week.

Finally, we’re stuck on one important detail: what to call this database? We’ve been calling it the “safety study database” while working on it, however, many of the studies are not, strictly speaking, safety studies. Many of them are studies that compare GE crops to their conventional counterparts (and different genetic modification methods) on the basis of gene expression or other changes. These do have safety implications, but less directly. There are feeding studies, nutritional and biochemical analysis, and research on substantial equivalence. What would you call such a resource? Help us brainstorm!

Everything seems to be working – the Forum, comments, pages, posts, etc. But if you find any bugs, please do not hesitate to let us know on the contact page.

One of the things that we discovered while kicking around my place of origin is that we could very easily keep talking about GE crops and related issues until our voices ran out. We covered a lot of ground and have since thought that it would be nice to share some of those thoughts in more ways than just through written paragraphs. We recorded a video conversation right after we got back to my folk’s place from Chez Panisse, which I should have edited pretty soon, for example, and then there’s also the interview for my radio show. But we would like to do more. What do y’all think about a Biofortified podcast?

Our idea is to record a conversation once a month to talk about recent issues, thoughts we’ve had, and we could also add interviews to it. For instance, the Executive Director of the Non-GMO Project, Megan Westgate, has already agreed to record an audio interview with me for the blog, and we could put that in there. I have enough recording equipment at home to be able to include up to three different locations in a recorded conversation: one phone line, one skype, and a couple local microphones. So we could also rotate through other blog contributors who might like to chat over the phone, and there are ways for readers/listeners to contribute audio quotes and questions which we could try down the road.

Would you listen to it? What would you like to hear on it? Chat about recent issues not covered on the blog, or find general topics to discuss?

What should we call it?

And what kind of music just says Biofortified all over it?

There are three weeks left to the month, I bet we could figure this out before the first episode at the beginning of March!

[Later edited to add image awesomeness]

Our lunch date with Michael has been moved to dinner, and given that we will be leaving early Tuesday morning to return to the Midwest, that doesn’t leave much time for reflection. We’ll see what we can do while we are still in the same place, but there will certainly be much to talk about on the blog post-Chez Panisse.

In the coming weeks, I plan to give the blog a much-needed visual and functional update. Biofortified is run with WordPress, which allows for an enormous set of possibilities. I plan to replace the blog’s current theme with a more functional updated one that will look similar. The fading features gallery seen before on the blog will return, which was lost because of a conflict between the current theme and a recent wordpress update. Along the sidebar, we have added Frank’s Twitter widget, an awards section (hopeful for more!), and a Networked Blogs widget that shows who is following the blog in Facebook. With the updated theme, I will also add a much-needed “Latest Forum Posts” section so that you don’t have to sift through the forum categories to see if people are talking about things. Of course, the recent comments and calendar are good things to have, and the tabs full of information will stay, too.

What other kinds of sidebar features have you seen on the blogs that you read that you would like to see here? (Tag cloud, Similar Posts, Google news feed…)

Now on to the other special functions and doodads we are going to include in the blog. Another great thing about WordPress if that we can quickly upload and activate plugins that give the blog new functions. There are thousands of such plugins to choose from.

As has been mentioned before, we are going to include a plugin that will enable contributors who have their own blogs to have new posts automatically (or near-automatically) syndicated on Biofortified. So for those of us who blog in more than one place, this will make life easier. But for readers who have their own blogs and would like to contribute from time to time, we will be able to set you up in the plugin to be able to do so. This has the potential to greatly expand the number of bloggers who can be a part of this group blogging effort. In fact, it might make us not only a group blog but also a blogging network! We are trying to see if the author of the Feedwordpress plugin will be able to modify the plugin to suit a few special needs we have that could make this process go more smoothly. Contributors could advertise their involvement with a special banner, and readers and fans could have one too. Here is one mockup.

Next, it would be great if we could make it possible for other bloggers to be able to show the latest posts on Biofortified on their sidebars. For wordpress, this is easy, as there are many feed-reading sidebar plugins to choose from, and we could even customize our own if we wanted to. But this leaves out bloggers without a wordpress blog. It would be great if we could make (or modify) some javascript code that will allow the latest posts (and last comment?) from the posts and comments rss feeds to be displayed on the sidebars of other sites. Here’s a mockup of what I thought it might look like. Anyone know any javascript or know someone who does? A feature like this would greatly enhance our ability to show that there is an ongoing discussion to attract readers from other blogs. Sure, we could just encourage people to subscribe to the feeds… but this would be so much cooler! Note the optimistic blog post titles in the example image!

Next, if the page on Genetic Engineering Companies is any indication, there is great potential in getting help from readers in adding content to the pages of the site. The quintessential model of group participation on the web is a wiki, would that be a good addition to Biofortified? Perhaps it could be used to build a database of terms and concepts often discussed on the blog, or going whole-hog and building a comprehensive information resource from the ground-up. The wiki could be hosted internally or on the free Wikispot site, which I have been involved with. Here is an example of a wiki on genetics that I started a couple years ago, but only got so far as to build a few basic pages and 500 placeholders for terms and concepts. A external wiki could be very useful, but it means more time spent managing the wiki and less time spent writing  posts.

Then again, there is also a wikifying plugin for wordpress that will allow us to open up certain pages for registered users to edit on their own and build content. We could do a ‘project of the month’ or something to try to add batches of pages to the blog. As with all wikis, there are issues with vandalism, however, there are ways to deal with that. Do either of these wiki ideas sound like a good idea?

Speaking of adding pages, Anastasia is working on a list of books for the blog, and proceeds of sales will go to supporting the blog.

Anything else? Video in the sidebar? Related Posts plugin? Enhanced user profile pages? I’m open to suggestions! Feel free to get lost in the WordPress plugin directory – people have all kinds of interesting ideas expressed in widget form.

So what are we going to do now that Biofortified is solvent? Plan a big bash? Make some movies? Personally, I like the idea of renting some space at a tropical research station for a little winter nursery to do some field trials. But that’s just me.

Also, over Thanksgiving we finalized the details of our Michael Pollan meetup. On January 25th at 1:00 pm (PST), Anastasia, Karl, and Yours Truly will be having lunch with Michael at the shwanky Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. This might be a first for this locavore restaurant – will they serve ‘my kind’?

Unfortunately, there will not be any interviewing going on to be posted on the blog, however we are hoping to have a… ahem, Frank discussion with the bestselling author about genetics and food. We’ll certainly have questions for him, but we’re hoping that he will also have questions for us. But the big question on my mind is, what should I order?

We have won a $1500 grant which we will use to bring more good stuff to the site, a conversation with Michael Pollan which will be sure to be enlightening for all, and an enhanced social media training session. Specific details of the last two have yet to be worked out, but what was conjecture last week is truly official now!

We will also be featured in a one-page ad in the Stanford Social Innovation Review magazine. Start the presses!

The runners-up were the Non-GMO Project and “The Campaign for Healthier Eating in America.” Although vote totals are not visible on the site, our unofficial count put us at over 800 votes, more than twice the number of votes of each of these two entries. The most-voted Latin American entry, Healthy Kids, Healthy Forests, has also won a round-trip ticket to anywhere in South America.

In what was a phenomenally exciting final few days of the contest, science bloggers and more came out of the woodwork to support us, and we would like to thank each and every one of you again for your help in promoting us and voting for us. A lot of people should deservedly share in this victory.

Not only is it a victory for science communication, but also for dialogue, honesty, and independence. There are a lot of vested interests on both sides of the debate over genetic engineering, and it is heartening to see that an independent group blog such as ours could muster support from the blogosphere and get people talking about the genetics of food like never before. I would like to see this continue, through the posts we will continue to write, more guest commentaries, interviews, videos, and conversations with each other in the new forum. We’ve been getting suggestions for new ideas, and we welcome more.

I would like to commend the Non-GMO Project and in particular their Executive Director Megan Westgate for supporting honest dialogue when things got a little ugly and accusations were flying around. And the Ashoka Changemakers people behind the scenes had to sift through almost two thousand votes to certify the contest – not a small feat so pat them on the back. I would like to thank them for hosting this contest and helping to facilitate more discussion on this important topic.

We’re now Change-Makers, so lets go out there and make some real change in the discussion about changes in the genetics of our plants. I hope you will stick around here awhile longer and help make a few changes yourselves. Let’s make our second year blogging here better than the first!

I know I see a lot of new faces around lately, some people introducing themselves here and there, but there are a lot more people reading than commenting. Blogs sometimes have “de-lurker” posts for people who who have been reading in the background (so-called Lurkers) to drop in and say hi. Tell us a bit about yourselves, what do you want to see here in the future? Favorite crop?

In the meantime, enjoy Ghost of ‘Frankenfood’ Haunts Europe. Boo!

Last week, James and the Giant Corn gave us a plug with Putting Prejudice over Science. The Council for Biotechnology Information gave us a plug on Twitter, as well as Mica from Monsanto on her twitter account. Thanks for helping! We enjoyed an early lead of a dozen votes at the beginning, but when Monday morning rolled around, we were behind the Non-GMO Project by about 100 votes. They gathered an impressive number of votes from Friday through the weekend, networking through facebook and other places.

But then at a little after 8 in the morning PZ Myers of the popular blog, Pharyngula, boomed Yum, Genetically Engineered Plants! An hour later, we overtook the competition and took the lead! PZ is an immensely popular blogger, and the pulse of his endorsement was felt across the world, from California to the UK! It was almost inexplicable! Thanks for your help!

Later that day, the indomitable ‘Mean Girl’ Abbie Smith at Endogenous Retrovirus joined in with Vote for Biofortified! and chimed “DOO EEEEEET FOR THE PAPAYAS!!!!” She also liked the discussion going on at the changemakers site on our entry, and anyone that sticks up for the papayas gets an AA in their punnett square as far as I’m concerned. Thank you ERV!

With A Science-based blog about GMO, Tim Kreider at Science Based Medicine gave us a shining endorsement and sent a new army of voters our way. We are happy they like what we are doing over here, we love what you do for medicine over there! Thanks Tim!

Apparently, our quick influx of voters made a few people upset, and they started saying not-so-nice things about who must be supporting us. Cries of “Fixing the Competition” by the ‘biotech industry’ were flying around thanks to my newest bestest buddy GM Watch. And PZ Myers jumped back into the fray with a second post on his blog, saying …and those cheapskates at Monsanto haven’t given me a penny! Thanks PZ for the double-plug, and thanks GM Watch for keeping the attention on us! They must have thought we made a Deal with the Devil… they just didn’t know what kind. We were Pharyngulated.

Dr. ‘Orac’ at Respectful Insolence couldn’t stand to have PZ be the only one getting “all that filthy Monsanto lucre” so he posted, I may be late to this party, but I want my big Monsanto check anyway! You won’t be late in our thanks, oh acrylic-encased one. Thank you!

Thank you everyone who passed on our message through email, facebook, over the phone, etc. Your efforts are not forgotten, pat yourselves on the back – you know who you are!

And thank you Anastasia, Pam, Karl, and David for your tireless efforts to get out the vote and welcome people to the site! You’re all heavyweight science bloggers now. We have only one week to wait as the votes are tallied officially and the winner is announced next Wednesday. The votes are not visible on the entries anymore, but the last tally we had that was just minutes before the contest was closed placed the top three entries in this order:

Biofortified: 830 votes

The Campaign for Healthier Eating in America: 379 votes

The Non-GMO Project: 347 votes

These results are by no means final, as the changemakers team still has to verify that each vote came from a registered user, and we have undoubtedly made their job a lot harder. But it looks like we may have won by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Thanks for your support, everyone who managed to make it through their site to register – I know how hard it was so it means a lot to this little ear. We made a really good showing in this contest, and I hope you will stick around and read what else our bloggers have to say in the future, and check back on Wednesday for the results! Thanks again for everyone who supported us!

Enjoy this nifty graph of the voting progress:

Science is so cool!

And a good time was had by all!

Look, we just passed 600 votes!