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ICSTI: NFAIS Enotes, June 8, 2005
- To: epc@iucr.org
- Subject: ICSTI: NFAIS Enotes, June 8, 2005
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 08:35:44 +0100
- Organization: IUCr
---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: FW: NFAIS Enotes, June 8, 2005 Date: Wednesday 08 June 2005 9:35 pm From: "Siegel, Elliot (NIH/NLM)" <siegel@NLM.NIH.GOV> To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL Fyi -- A very thoughtful report on one person's mastery of today's practical Internet information management tools. Kudos to Jill at NFAIS! (Sorry for any duplication.) Elliot -----Original Message----- From: Jill Oneill [mailto:jilloneill@nfais.org] Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 8:53 AM To: NFAIS-L@LISTSERV.SILVERPLATTER.COM Subject: NFAIS Enotes, June 8, 2005 NFAIS Enotes, June 8, 2005 Written and compiled by Jill O'Neill Processing Information My handling of the daily flow of information across my desk has shifted over the course of the past year. My role at NFAIS requires that I track a significant stream of diverse content - scholarly journal articles, news stories, organizational press releases, blog entries, etc. - and over the past eight months, fulfilling the requirements of that role has been accomplished in large part through the support of Yahoo! Some years ago, I set up a personalized page for myself at MyYahoo! It was a way of keeping a calendar, accessing my Yahoo! email account, and centralizing access to certain look-up tools such as UPS package tracking, weather forecasts, and driving directions. My (limited) use of it was purely personal, to ensure that work and home didn't conflict. Then, as I indicated last November in an issue of NFAIS Enotes, Yahoo! made it possible for me to receive RSS feeds through my personalized page. The enhancement was significant. [Background on RSS available at http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml ] As Morgan-Stanley indicated in an October 2004 report, "The key is that desired information, upon creation, is served to an individual's 'always on' personalized page, and the need to visit source Web sites to see if new articles have been posted is eliminated. All in thanks to Yahoo's aggregation efforts, users get more information, they get it in a way that is organized/efficient, and their satisfaction rises. And yes, the stickiness of MyYahoo! rises for its users, creating the potential for new revenue streams." http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/dw_syndicat ion1004.pdf I began to use the portal page to receive RSS Feeds from the New York Times, Business Week, Wired and CNN as well as from individually authored library weblogs (such as those by Lorcan Dempsey [ http://orweblog.oclc.org/ ] and GaryPrice [ http://www.resourceshelf.com ]). It has made monitoring the industry buzz amazingly convenient. The customized layout was a plus; I could arrange the page so that source feeds appeared in different places on the page according to publication type. The boxed and multi-color presentation makes the four or five headlines provided from each site easier to scan rather than having to process subject lines from various email-based services. In fact, all but one of the email-based alerting services to which I currently subscribe have been made redundant, if not obsolete. I haven't cancelled any of them because one always wants a back-up system, but email is no longer my primary channel for receiving news. As one metric of success, Nielsen Net Ratings indicated that the MyYahoo! service attracted just over 19.5 million unique visitors during the month of May 2005. Yet another metric of the success of MyYahoo! may be that Google also launched a personalized home page in late May. Their beta version is a poor imitation, with a minimal number of feed options. The beta version of "Fusion" (the personalized tool's brand name at Google) was launched at the Google Factory Tour to impress an audience of bloggers, analysts and journalists, but one critic referred to it as "painfully immature". Another used a "New Coke" analogy. Google claims that it will be more impressive in three months, according to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch, [ http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3506541 ] when Fusion will be able to support inclusion of any RSS feed. Google also claims that their page is easier to customize than the MyYahoo! tool. News aggregators, such as Bloglines or Findory, get squeezed in this scenario. Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, swiftly pointed out how the Google and Yahoo services were inferior to his. [ http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/000204.html ] But the real point here is that if you expect to be providing current awareness tools in the 21st century, you will want to study what's going on in this adjacent sector of public RSS feeds and news aggregators. The New York Times is an authoritative source. I monitor news from the Times in a variety of ways, one of which, as I mentioned before, is the RSS feed that I read in the MyYahoo! page. But even if that is how I initially receive the morning's headlines from the Times, it is not the way in which I monitor public interest in their stories. The New York Times Digital (NYTD) has for some years offered a page that displayed the Most Frequently Emailed Articles from the Times - a great method for gathering data on what external parties believe to be of most interest in your content. It is only been in the past year that the link to that page has moved from an unobtrusive placement on story pages to appearing as a link on the NYTD home page. But I have another method for identifying what is attracting attention in the Times. Blogrunner, another news aggregator, has created an interesting service called The Annotated New York Times [ http://annotatedtimes.blogrunner.com/ ]. This service combines the most-frequently-emailed data from the Times and correlates it with entries made in Weblogs tracked by Blogrunner. It provides the NYTimes headline with the same brief annotation that appears with that headline on the NYTD most-frequently email page. It then matches that content with links that appear in the weblogs, and indicates the number of "annotations" or comments that appear on weblogs about that specific Times content. I could obtain much of this information by running a search through Technorati [ http://www.technorati.com ], a system that tracks approximately 11 million weblogs internationally. But the value-add offered by the Blogrunner's Annotated Times service is that it is organized and re-presented to me in sections familiar to me from the printed Times. I can see the articles from the Times Technology section or the Books section, viewing not just the story, but the buzz surrounding it as well. Think about that type of application as applied to journal publications and provided by an A&I service. Imagine offering users a service that captures the discussion of authoritative content, not just in terms of citation activity in formal publications, but at an informal level as well, whether disdainful in tone or corroborative. In the past, much of the intellectual discourse between researchers occurred through letters. Some journals include letters columns that commented on points raised in published material. The use of letters continues even in the digital journal environment (see this example from the British Medical Journal: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/324/7351/1414/a#27739. But with the rise of both individual and collaborative blogging in certain disciplines, it isn't difficult to predict that the communication function fostered by journals just might move elsewhere. It is already easy to find examples of scholarly writing in blogs. An individual example is Facetation [ http://www.deregulo.com/facetation ], but a longer list could readily be assembled. Crooked Timber [ http://www.crookedtimber.org ] tends towards informal discourse, but some entries move over into genuine scholarly debate. The availability of RSS feeds can facilitate user awareness of new content and amplify the conversation about that content. For example, California State University - San Marcos considering the pros and cons of utilizing RSS by creating a module that can create on-demand feeds for any journal, newspaper, or user-conducted search via their federated search system. RSS feeds have already been accepted. The trend to watch for is whether or not the feeds of authoritative content sustain and drive the conversations in a personal publishing environment. It is too early to say where the population will head. But the fact is that future scholars, raised with platforms such as Xanga and LiveJournal, are used to communicating through a variety of channels. It would serve information resource providers well if their products and services reflected an understanding of those channels. Some organizations are getting it. NLM's PubMed has embraced dissemination via RSS feed, and that stance puts them ahead of many content providers, although it' is worth noting that reports from Special Library Association held this week in Toronto indicate that EI Compendex will soon be enabling a similar type of alerting service, allowing a user to set up a search alert, the results of which are then fed back to the user via the RSS option. PubMed Enabling RSS http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj05/mj05_rss.html EI Compendex Enabling RSS (June 6 entry) http://christinaslibraryrant.blogspot.com/ RSS feeds provide a readily available mechanism for embedding content into the workflow, whether teaching in the classroom [See http://showme.physics.drexel.edu/bradley/DrexelCoAS017-JayatWebCT.ppt ] or communicating within the enterprise. [ Read http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,1786020,00.asp ]. EI also gets points for considering the implementation of a "Blog This" feature - a button that allows an individual to create a link from a weblog to an article of interest. For an example of how this works in actual practice, visit MSNBC.com and randomly pick a news story (including any from Newsweek). At the foot of each story is a tool bar that facilitates printing, emailing or blogging the story. The MSNBC java script only works for the MyMSN service, but the recognition that users want to share content is in place. It is absolutely to EI's credit that they are moving in the same direction. The MyYahoo! service has been referred to by its creators as "the user's information dashboard". For me, a periodic check of this information dashboard helps me monitor how formal and informal publications perceive and report on the various players in the NFAIS community. It is an efficient means of staying on top of the news, both positive and negative, relevant to this membership. It is also labor-saving, time-efficient and (being as it is currently made available at no charge) blessedly cost-effective. I can then synthesize the content that I pick up from that information dashboard and further disseminate it through a blog at the Yahoo! 360 site [ http://360.yahoo.com ] or save it for later reference through Yahoo's MyWeb! service [ http://myweb.search.yahoo.com ]. The platform is robust. The distribution is seamless. User access is convenient. There is a trade-off here that needs to be acknowledged, however briefly. Yahoo! currently has more data on me as a registered user of their services than Amazon possesses on me - despite the fact that I've been a registered customer of Amazon for ten years. In exchange for providing me with no-cost information management tools, Yahoo! expects to derive value from mining aggregated usage data on my information-handling habits and the habits of millions of others. Google anticipates access to the same depth of aggregated data from users of their Fusion service. This table offers a snapshot of the information that Google can assemble based on the tools users employ at their site. [ http://www.axandra.com/news/index.htm ]. Yahoo's probably gathering the same. As yet, I have not linked my information dashboard into my taxpayer-supported Pennsylvania Access to database content licensed by the state and funneled into my local public library. Google, however, may be in a better position to facilitate such an online connection between the capture of RSS feeds in their Fusion service and the gated content in Google Scholar. If the objective is to embed information into the individual's workspace, then NFAIS members need to closely monitor this contest between portal giants. Jill O'Neill Director, Planning & Communications NFAIS (v) 215-893-1561 ------------------------------------------------------- -- Best wishes Peter Strickland Managing Editor IUCr Journals ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IUCr Editorial Office, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England Phone: 44 1244 342878 Fax: 44 1244 314888 Email: ps@iucr.org Ftp: ftp.iucr.org WWW: http://journals.iucr.org/ _______________________________________________ Epc mailing list Epc@iucr.org http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/epc
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