[Just belatedly realised this] Anyone who was at the AoIR Workshop on Web Science Research Methods in 2004 http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/AoIRASIST/ can claim to have discussed "Web Science" a full year ahead of Web founder TBL's attempt to play catch-up with the Web Science Research Initiative http://www.webscience.org/ ;-) So the AoIR got there first with the name as well as the idea for organised interdisciplinary Web research! But seriously, I think that the Web science initiative has the objective of harnessing interdisciplinary research for computer science goals - more specifically for building/engineering the Web as an effective information system (quoting from the article below: "the science of decentralised information systems"), whereas we are more interested in studying its use. So maybe there isn't really much of an overlap in the *core goals* of the AoIR and the WSRI after all, although anything TBL does is interesting. Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O'Hara, K., Shadbolt, N., & Weitzner, D. J. (2006). A framework for Web science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 1(1), 1-130. http://www.nowpublishers.com/product.aspx?product=WEB&doi=1800000001