###Why and how you should share your research **Research notes** are the crux of Public Laboratory -- they are essentially a blog which you or anyone can post to, sharing your work. Most importantly: **Posting a research note open sources your work.** While it's important to talk in person or on the mailing list about ideas, but we're trying to develop permanent documentation of our collaborative research. **Share photos, videos, and other media of your projects, the sites you're investigating, etc** and they will become a part of our open source environmental science literature. ###Video intro ###Tips * Please include a main photo. Just choose something on your hard drive. This will appear at the top. There is no associated caption. It will be resized to fit perfectly. Everybody is happier if you include a main photo. * You can include any hosted video or most media anywhere in the note by using the embedding code from the hosting site. * You can always edit the note after you save it. * You can either use rich text editor, or use some kind of obscure Markdown code stuff that most people have never heard off. It’s fun to learn. Here is a quick list of magic you can do with *_#[]()…. * Don’t forget to include some tags to link this note to others about the same subject. **** **Things this page should be expanded to include:** * Examples of short/informal and long/detailed posts * Show how people cite each other and how notes display related notes * Show how your notes accumulate on the "Contributors" page so you get credit and on your profile