On her Nature Network blog, Lab Life, Anna Kushnir tells of how her blog got her invited to the SciFoo conference at the Googleplex last summer (http://tinyurl.com/2eqzw7). There, she met Moshe Pritsker and Nikita Bernstein of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). The meeting led to a part-time job starting a blog on JoVE's website.

In her first JoVE blog post, Anna describes her difficulties in learning how to do transcardial perfusion on mice (http://tinyurl.com/yqwolr). “Oh how I could have used a video of the procedure... How I would have loved to rewind back to the part where he inserts the needle in just the right place in the heart to keep it beating while pushing the desired solution through the animal. Instead, I had two pages of manically scribbled, incomplete notes that I referred to as if they were sacred texts for the next two years.” She writes that JoVE's videos — professionally filmed and reviewed by editors for quality, integrity and authenticity — present even very difficult techniques in a “pausable, rewindable, and easily comprehensible format”.