Science Library Pad

Web 2.0 from a publisher perspective, using 2Collab as an example

One of the big challenges for all of us developing Web 2.0 is finding out what the users actually want.  That's part of why libraries and publishers are taking various lab, web development group, developer network and contest approaches.  Another big challenge is trying to build a community around your tools.

Just a quick review of some of the online activities:

There are lots of library labs, and a few publisher initiatives, including Elsevier Labs, Elsevier Scopus Labs (accessible only to Scopus subscribers), Ingenta Labs, and Nature's Web Publishing group (I don't think it has a home page, but you can see some of their work on Nature Launch Pad).  In the sort of library-vendor space OCLC and Talis have developer networks.  I think some of the other library catalogue vendors may have developer spaces, but they are usually closed.

Looking at a few more Elsevier things specifically:

Elsevier has SciTopics, which is also on Twitter.

Elsevier also just announced the winner of their Grand Challenge, the Reflect project (if you follow my FriendFeed, you may see some familiar names in the winning team, like Lars Juhl Jensen and Michael Kuhn).

Which brings us to Elsevier's 2Collab.  I had a chance for an advance preview of 2Collab in late 2007.  It takes a somewhat different tack to other academic bookmarking tools, focusing a lot on group collaboration.  I had a chance to see Camelia Csora present about 2Collab as a research collaboration tool (PDF) at NISO Discovery Tools forum in 2008.

There are lots of challenges with these kinds of tools.  Can we integrate them into user workflows?  Can they understand bibliographic metadata, do lookups on DOIs, read COINS from source and embed COINS into their bookmarking pages?  Can we build standard APIs for these services?

Camelia has moved on to ebooks, and I see in my FriendFeed today that the new Product Manager for 2Collab, Michael Habib, will be presenting about 2Collab as a publisher collaboration tool

http://www.slideshare.net/habibmi/engaging-a-new-generation-of-authors-reviewers-readers-through-web-20

You can read more in his posting Engaging a New Generation of Authors, Editors, and Reviewers - Presentation for Boston Editors' Conference.

One of the big challenges in this area is getting people into the new network in order to collaborate - this is the issue that most of the "scientist social networks" have - there's no one there.  Even using Google Docs to collaborate tends not to scale very well, as you end up having to invite and reinvite groups of people to each new document.  FriendFeed as a collaboration space I think has a lot of advantages, in that it brings an immediate, individual benefit (mindcasting/lifecasting unification of web activity) as well as a critical mass of people, as well as lightweight group and discussion tools.

That's not to say you couldn't use 2Collab along with FriendFeed - and it occurs to me that one immediate step all the publishers (and other service providers) could take would be to work with FriendFeed to add their academic bookmarking services added as top level "import" sites.  Right now, despite a strong scientific user community, FF only has the non-academic sites in its list: 

• delicious
• Diigo
• Furl (which is now gone, bought by Diigo)
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• StumbleUpon
• Twine
• はてな

The key point is it can no longer be either/or. It's not my site OR your site, it's all of our sites, interconnected. It's also/and.  I have to be able to go seamlessly from LibX to Zotero to Mendeley to Connotea to EndNote to 2Collab to Papers to FriendFeed and back again.  If Zotero has a great tool, I should be able to call it using an API from LibX.  Data can't be trapped at point of creation, it has to be able to flow around the web to be useful.

CiteULike academic article bookmarking

I had a chance to look at the academic bookmarking service CiteULike.org and speak with the team working on it.  (Disclaimer: Kevin Emamy of CiteULike contacted me to set up this presentation.)

Kevin and Richard Cameron walked me through the site and gave me a sense of their philosophy about it.

Basically the site started three years ago, you can find some info in their FAQ

Richard Cameron wrote CiteULike in November 2004 and ran the service privately. In December 2006 Richard teamed up with Chris Hall, Kevin Emamy and James Caddy to set up Oversity Ltd. to further develop and support CiteULike.

They're getting to a volume of use (1.5 million records posted) where they can start to look at extracting some of the "wisdom of crowds" and that sort of recommendation analysis will be one of their upcoming directions.  They already provide anonymised data for download, which I think is an admirable demonstration of information sharing.

They use "plugins" to extract metadata from websites, there are currently 45 plugins, these are parsers that run on the CiteULike site itself to parse the information.  As the plugins developer documentation states

Remember that CiteULike doesn't store actual URLs to articles - it tries to store the raw information required to manufacture a link. The reason behind this is that publishers can be quite brutal and insane sometimes about changing the URL structure on their sites. Sometimes (as in the case of Nature), they'll just break existing links to articles without telling anyone. In these situations, it's vital that CiteULike can dynamically produce the new style of URL so that the existing articles from that publisher in the system can still be accessed.

This is a very wise choice.  There are some sites that have links to post articles to CiteULike, e.g. Science magazine has "Post to CiteULike" in its Article Tools for individual articles.

Although I didn't mention it, I wonder if COINS or something similar could address metadata parsing issues.  Right now we have multiple sites with multiple different parsing approaches, and that is always inelegant to me, wearing my architecture hat.

SIDEBAR: Connotea has (I think) parsers written in Perl.  Zotero has an architecture called translators.  2collab has a very small number of parsers.  END SIDEBAR

You can create groups, they can either be fully public, or completely private.  There are various possible combinations of rights for joining as well as the option to restrict new group users.  Once you are a member of a group, you will get a check box in your "Post To" section when you create a new bookmark.

One thing that I find a bit confusing about CiteULike is its system of rating bookmarks by their reading priority.  Even more confusingly this is displayed as a number of stars, which makes it look like it is an article rating, when it is actually about article reading.  They said because of the very specific and narrow nature of domain and individual research, they don't believe it would be meaningful to have rankings.

That being said, there are group "Recommended" lists, these are constructed by aggregating the reading priorities assigned to articles posted to the group.

A nice and smart thing that they are doing is to put rel=nofollow on all their links, which reduces the attractiveness to spammers.  Spammers are something that all social networking sites need a strategy for, particularly ones that are link-centric.

There are some pages with Google Ads, but when I discussed their business model, it sounded to me that they were looking at something similar to LibraryThing for Libraries - providing aggregrated data to third parties for a fee - I can imagine something like the ability for article-centric sites to display "this article has been tagged X, Y, Z on CiteULike", but that is more me speculating than anything specific that they said.

I shared some of my thoughts about APIs and hopefully this will be an area for further discussion.

In doing the some searches as part of writing this posting, I found there is an interesting audio interview with Richard Cameron as part of the Talking with Talis podcast series.

Elsevier's 2collab article bookmarking service

I had the opportunity to preview some of the features and upcoming enhancements in Elsevier's 2collab bookmarking service.  Some of the details I will provide are not in the released beta yet, but they should be out soon.  (Disclaimer: this preview was set up for me by Elsevier, because of my blog.)

The basic interface and method of operation will be familiar to users of delicous or the more specialised science bookmarking and bibliography-management services like Connotea, Zotero and CiteULike.  I do have to remind myself that most people doing academic work are not aware of such services, and Elsevier is of course well-positioned to reach huge numbers of users in the course of their daily interactions with its content.

2collab is a completely free, open, stand-alone service.  I made a point of asking about import and export of bookmarks and both are supported.  Once you're logged into your account, you can go to manage and select "import bookmarks" or "export bookmarks".  The version of import I was shown supported various other bookmarking services.  You can export in various fairly simple file formats.

In terms of bookmarking it doesn't yet have the ability to import very rich metadata.  It can get good information (journal, title, volume, pages etc.) from PubMed, Scopus and ScienceDirect, but for other services it just works like a plain URL bookmarker.  I suggested they might look into either or both of

• being able to read COINS microformat and encouraging sites to including COINS
• an infrastructure to build site translators either similar to Zotero's or ideally sharing the same technology as Zotero (assuming both groups would be willing)

A strength of 2collab is the ability to create an manage groups.  I had experimented with creating a group in Connotea (ARL e-Science Task Force) but as far as I could tell, there was no way to have only particular bookmarks in it - it appears to show all the bookmarks from all the members of the group.

The 2collab group abilities appear better, you can create open public groups, closed public groups (you can see the bookmarks, but have to request membership in order to be able to add bookmarks) and completely private groups.  When you make a bookmark, it will list your group memberships with a checkbox to select which groups to share with.  You can also copy a bookmark into a group using the "edit bookmark" screen. 

Any bookmarks you make are private by default, you have to explicitly share them by selecting a "make public" checkbox.  If you try to copy a private bookmark to a public group, it will pop up a warning box and let you choose what you want to do. 

You can rank and comment on bookmarks.  You can get RSS feeds on tags, groups and users.

Not surprisingly they are taking some advantage of their access to Scopus data, it will automatically pull in the number of Scopus citations for an article, and if you know your Scopus Author ID(s), you can use that to pull in articles you have written (you can also mark yourself as an author when making a bookmark).

In the new version it will show a little blue "OWN" icon on bookmarks that you have made, and a little golden "AUT" icon on bookmarks of articles where you have indicated you are an author.

I asked them about APIs, they seemed fairly open to discussion, they described 2collab as a "data aggregation platform".  You can get an idea of their current thinking from their blog posting Next Big Things - pt 1: integration is the key.

UPDATE 2007-11-28:  More thoughts after working with the November 27th release and its new features.  It is not yet a very tag-centric system.  You can't do a mass rename or split of tags.  You can't attach an explanation to a tag, a Connotea feature I use a lot to explain tags I use for particular presentations or reports.  You also can't set an embargo period for a bookmark, it is only public or private.  There is no way to "friend" another user or follow their bookmarks within the system (you can get RSS feeds to use externally).  That being said, I do find the 2collab "fresh face" is a clean design and quite intuitive to use.

lame bookmarking advertisement interruptions @ USA Today

Read a story in USA Today, for once I thought, hey, I'll use the Facebook button on the page, rather than using my Firefox bookmarklet.

And I got an ad interstitial.

http://www.usatoday.com/_ads/interstitial/2007/page/interstitial.htm?http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2007-11-04-big-bang_N.htm&title=There's%20a%20science%20to%20CBS'%20'Big%20Bang%20Theory'

Are you kidding me?  I have to watch an ad before I send a URL to another website?

Firefox bookmarklet it is from now on.

digg for librarians

Just discovered this today

http://liszen.com/trends/

Zotero 2.0 - DLF Fall Forum - Nov 6, 2007

raw presentation notes

Zotero

Trevor Owens

"The Fluidity of Bibliography"

Smart Bib: easy metadata embedding
(coins embedded)

Read Write Bib (using Wikipedia exmaple)

Visualizing Bib (using Simile Timeline)

Smart Bib:
demo of grabbing embedded bib info from a web page

Zotero 2.0 - Zotero Server
* shared collections and notes
* scholarly groups in macro- and micro- disciplines, official groups
* recommendations
* bibliographic feeds
* APIs

Q: Where is the server
A: One server, at Zotero (Center for Media), closed source

Q (me, paraphrased): Will there be server API usage limitations?  We might like to send queries to retrieve recommendations every time someone does a search, that could be a lot of traffic.
A: TBD... it will be mostly constrained by server performance and capacity

creating topic-based portals

There are a couple sites I have noticed lately for collaboratively creating topic-based portals, an activity that falls somewhere between collaborative bookmarking and Wikipedia.  The sites are

Zimbio

example: Web 2.0 for Learning

and BlinkList Spaces

example: Business 301 Classroom

Slashdot bookmarks and tags

Slashdot has a bookmarking and tagging system, but it's a bit awkward.
Once logged in, you can bookmark manually at

http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl

They also have bookmarklets to do the same thing.
You can add tags, but onewordonly, no "multiple word" tags.
To edit a bookmark, the only way I could find was to go to Bookmarks->Recent and click on the "bookmark" link next to the one you want to change.

http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl/?op=showbookmarks&recent=1

You can view your tags at http://slashdot.org/my/tags but you can't actually do anything with them yet.
There is some cross-integration between bookmarks, your journal, and story submission.

You can even get yourself a little "Slashdot Me" badge.

   Slashdot It

There's a FeedFlare to SUBMIT a Slashdot article, but I couldn't find one to bookmark an article, so I just made one.

Download slashdot-bookmark.xml

Blogmarks problems

Is anyone having problems with Blogmarks.net?
Every time I try to post a bookmark, when it asks me to log in, I get "Connexion problem !"

I did a search on this error, but I didn't get any hits.

I see on the site that other people continue to add bookmarks, so obviously it continues to work for some.

Google Bookmarks FeedFlare Unit

I couldn't find a "Google Bookmark This" FeedFlare Unit, so I made one.

Download googlebookmark-this.xml

It's based on Furl This, by Emily Robbins, in the Flare Catalog.

(UPDATE: I also checked the 101 Flares list, but there wasn't a Google Bookmark one there either.)

Technorati tag: feedflareunit

Well, that's the theory anyway - currently the FeedFlare parser seems to reject it for some reason.

UPDATE: It appears that (not surprisingly) FeedFlare is caching files on input - this means if you edit the file and save it with the same name, it will continue to read the old, incorrect, cached file.  I had to change the filename in order to get it to work (that is, to get it to read the new fixed file).

Also note: you can debug Flares using the FeedFlare Scratchpad.

the same, different bookmark

There is this web thing called default page.  The default is usually index.html, default.html, or default.htm

So if I have a URL like

http://www.nature.com/nature/multimedia/googleearth/index.html

I actually only need

http://www.nature.com/nature/multimedia/googleearth/

and it will work fine; it's essentially the same URL.

So who would ever go around bothering to cut out the index.html bit?
Err, me.
If it doesn't need to be there, I'm deleting it.

But this causes a bookmarking problem.  If I bookmark the above with the index.html, delicious happily locates 8 other bookmarkers.

If I bookmark it WITHOUT the index.html, there I am, all alone.

But surely this is fundamentally the exact same URL?  Am I asking too much of delicious to consider these two the same?

Connotea FeedFlare Unit

I couldn't find a "Connotea This" FeedFlare Unit, so I made one.

Here is connotea-this.xml

It's based on Furl This, by Emily Robbins, in the Flare Catalog.

Thanks go to Martin Flack for providing me with the necessary Connotea syntax.

Technorati tag: feedflareunit

furl to delicious bookmarks

If you want to take advantage of, and get noticed by, the wise crowds, the challenge is to be where the people are. 

(That is a message that holds for libraries as well.)

Where the people are, as far as I can tell, is mostly looking at the first page of regular Google search results.  But there are some communities.  It's hard to tell what the real ones are though.  Many sites are much bigger in "buzz size" than they are in actual membership.  That being said, there are at least some Usual Suspects:

delicious for bookmarking
Flickr for photos

One of the reasons I think Picasa Web Albums is misguided is that ship has sailed.  Just give up and support Flickr already.

For bookmarking, however, delicious doesn't quite do it for me.  I like Furl better.
But then, I'm not participating in the delicious community conversation.

So I experimented with copying my Furl bookmarks to delicious, here is the result

http://del.icio.us/scilibfurl

I used the Python code furl2delicious.py from Anything Else: Furl to Delicious, with the necessarily modifications from the comments.

Mac OS X comes with Python, so I just ran it at the command line.

Since I have 1561 bookmarks in Furl, with multiple tags, and only 599 made it to delicious, with only one tag each (UPDATE 2006-06-16: And it splits multi-word tags into multiple tags, instead of joining them), I think it is only a moderate success.

A better way to maintain both sets is to get one of those bookmarklets that lets you send your bookmarks to multiple sites at once.  Right now I am trying a bookmarklet built with Site Submission MultiTool - Alan's Marklet Maker.  It brings up both interfaces, with the URL info filled in - about as good as you could do without a lot of custom work I guess.

Google Notebook is live

http://www.google.com/notebook

There's an extension you have to download

System requirements:

• Windows XP or Linux (may not work with Mac OSX)
• Firefox 1.5+ (Internet Explorer version available here)

However, it installed fine for me (Mac OS X 10.4.6, Firefox 1.5.0.3)

You're supposed to get a "Note this" link in Google search results but I don't - maybe because it's Google.ca that I get, not Google.com?

It puts a "Open Notebook" button in the bottom right of the status bar, and adds a contextual menu item "Note this".

If you highlight some text on the page, it will make that the "note" and attach the page URL.

Opening the Notebook pops up a little window in the lower-right of your browser.  I don't see any way to resize it - you can just make it a bar, or make it fullscreen.

Here's a Notebook about Notebooks I just made.

There isn't really any concept of tagging.  You can make sections, that's about it.
The full page is Ajaxified, you can drag and drop notes between sections.
As soon as you make changes, they appear in the public version of the notebook (if you have made it public).

You can change the note after you have saved it, but you CANNOT change the link that is associated with it.  I wanted to change a long login URL that Yahoo made when I went to notepad.yahoo.com, but I can't find any way to edit it in Google Notebook.

Seems like a very dumb linkblog to me.  How dumb?  There is no RSS feed for the notebook, for one thing.  I have to say, I don't get it.  There is WAY better software (desktop apps or web apps) for this sort of thing available.

the rise of new media, the fall of the old

So which will libraries be, old media or new media?

The ubiquitous Jian Ghomeshi ("CBC pop culture specialist") is doing a series called

The End

This includes The End of Radio, TV and

The End of Print

which will air May 20, 2006 at 9:30 pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld.
All episodes will be available online as Windows Media or QuickTime, currently only The End of Radio is up.  From a library perspective, the blurbage for End of Print is interesting

Google Print, a full-text search engine of every book ever published launched the project late last year with much fanfare. The project has the potential to replace yellowing card-catalogs with a book search product as powerful and comprehensive as Google's search engine for the web.

Yeah, we really should think about some way to put that Public Catalogue Online so that it can be Accessed.

<rant>I do have an ongoing issue with the CBC (and other channels) that try to "youthify" their networks by bringing in youth experts who are... middle aged.  George Stroumboulopoulos is not edgy.  He's ancient.  Street Cents is the only show that succeeds somewhat in this area, what with it using people who are actually like, under 30 years old.</rant>

The Economist recently looked at media from the reverse perspective, discussing blogs, wikis, and other usual suspects in a Survey on New Media - Among the Audience.

the Trotts decided to build a better “blogging tool”, which they called Movable Type. “Likening it to the printing press seemed like a natural thing because it was clearly revolutionary; it was not meant to be arrogant or grandiose,” says Ms Trott to the approving nod of Mr Trott, who is extremely shy and rarely talks. ...

These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however, also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era, which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings, especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of the transition at all, find it puzzling.

Calling it the “internet era” is not helpful. By way of infrastructure, full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, “always-on”, broadband access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years behind. Indeed, even today's broadband infrastructure was built for the previous era, not the coming one. ...

The age of participation

... Last November, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet—from text to pictures, music and video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them

In addition to the articles, there are five audio interviews (MP3 format).

The Globe referenced the Economist article on wikis in an editorial

Wikipedia's world, and where it points us
Monday, May 1, 2006, Page A12

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge. Media groups will have to find a way to emulate Wikipedia and bring readers and viewers inside the tent, as this newspaper is trying to do by, among other things, inviting on-line comments and organizing question-and-answer sessions with journalists. ... Government itself, that ultimate control freak, will have to open up to the views of its Web-empowered citizens. In the same way that Wikipedia presumes "collaboration among users will improve articles over time," government should learn to accept that collaboration among citizens can change things for the better.

If we can harness our collective wisdom the way Wikipedia has, the potential for unleashing human creativity is enormous. Instead of a camel, we just might create a unicorn.

This did not impress some people, such as

PAUL AXELROD

dean, Faculty of Education, York University

Toronto -- Your benign defence of Wikipedia (Wikipedia's World, And Where It Points Us -- editorial, May 1) is misplaced and naive. It is one thing to hail the Internet as a "democratic" venue for the expression of opinion, informed or otherwise. It is quite another for an "encyclopedia" with no academic standards and no discretion with respect to the choice of authors to pose as some kind of intellectual authority, and, worse, to be legitimized as such by The Globe.

It's one of three comments under the heading Weni, widi, wiki.

Writing on May 6, 2006, Shannon Rupp covered the issue of Wikipedia's reliability for the Globe

Working through Wikipedia's vanity fair

...

Wikipedia's name gives the wrong impression, said Simon Fraser University communications professor Richard Smith. The open-source site (meaning it can be written and edited by anyone) is called an encyclopedia only for lack of a better term.

"It's socially produced knowledge. But they didn't know what they were producing when they began," Prof. Smith said, explaining that many of the volunteer editors are authorities on their subjects. "It's like being cool in high school: You build up social capital. You do something uncool and you're gone. If you lied on Wikipedia, you would shame yourself."

... new media or old, the same guideline applies: Always consider the source.

The Globe also had an article about modern photography.  It went something like "Flickr Flickr, Flickrflickrflickr".  That's it.  Everyone is now officially banned from talking about Flickr.  Find a new example.  The article is One Giant Web Gallery.

Also in Globe world, Dave Chalk discussed web video in Nothing on TV?  Where's my Canadian iTunes TV, that's what I want to know.

Lastly, Digg unearthed a past BayCHI event

Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information
Neil Hunt, Netflix; David Porter, Live365; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Kevin Rose, Digg; Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us; Rashmi Sinha, Moderator

There is audio (1h48m, MP3) as well as notes.

trying to track too much information

Firefox extensions for Connotea

Connotea is a social bookmarking tool for scientists.
There are Two New Tools For Firefox Users, one that greasemonkeys an add-to-connotea link into PubMed results, and a search plugin.

Furl Firefox extensions

I use Furl for all my work-related bookmarks (library technology, information security etc.) - http://www.furl.net/members/rakerman

Via Contentious I find a couple handy tools:

• Firefox search plugin that searches your own Furl bookmarks (My furl archive)
• Firefox toolbar from Furl

linkroll.com auctioned on eBay

I just noticed that social bookmarking site linkroll.com was just auctioned off on eBay.
I suppose I should also mention that the bookmark dates on linkroll.com have been wrong I think for as long as I have been using it.  02 Nov 2004 seems to be a popular date on the system, even for bookmarks I just made.

So the next question becomes: can one get one's bookmarks off of linkroll.com easily?
As far as I can tell, the answer is no.
You could of course either go through and save page copies of the bookmarks display, or write some code to crawl your pages and suck up the bookmarks.

The creator appears to be  Charles Coxhead, who writes in Surfarama

I developed linkroll on a whim a while back now, and if someone else wants to take it over that would be great.

Welcome to the world of "free" Web 2.0 services.

EA and SOA info overload, courtesy of John Gøtze

A couple resources with an overwhelming amount of information:

Gotzeblogged Blogging eGovernment - from Enterprise Architecture to eDemocracy

GotzeTagged

GotzeTagged is an open content linksharing service with thematic, categorised and annotated links on a variety of subjects.

In one word, GotzeTagged is a personomy, a one-person folksonomy/tagsonomy. The personomy belongs to me, John Gotze ...

The portal has been augmented by the use of various services, such as del.icio.us, MSN News, Yahoo News, and Amazon.

He has many links gathered for Service-Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, and related topics.  As well as indicated above, the individual pages for each tag pull info from many sources including Technorati, delicious, MSN Search, Yahoo News and Amazon.

Dr. John Gøtze's bio reads in part

I preach and teach e-government, enterprise architecture, standardization, openization, governance, digital leadership, strategic planning, communities of practice and much more.

...

I'm also a non-tenured associate professor at the Department of Informatics at Copenhagen Business School, where I teach a new course on enterprise architecture and run an EA master's class at the IT-University of Copenhagen.

That's kind of cool, because CBS is where I attended Info Grid 2005.

RawSugar tagged bookmarks

RawSugar is another service that lets you tag bookmarks, search the corpus of tagged pages and such.  You can make collections on particular topics, e.g. here's one for Ajax programming resources.

ways to generate a linkblog display

I blog to a bookmarking service (Furl) and then as you can see if you're reading this as a web page, I display some of those bookmarks in my sidebar on the right.  There are a few ways to do this:

* Linkroll has built-in features for making JavaScript to display links.  Click the JS button on your links page.
* Furl has built-in features for making JavaScript as well, they call it Add Furl to My Site.
* Delicious provides an HTML service, which you are supposed to cache if you want to display it on your page.  UPDATE 2005-Nov-17 Delicious also provides JavaScript linkrolls.  JS link via blogdriverswaltz.
* The main other option is to take an RSS feed and use a service to turn it into JavaScript.

The main RSS-to-JavaScript service I use is Feedsplitter.  It provides some styles that you can define on your site.

A new one is FeedBurner's BuzzBoost.  First take the RSS and create a FeedBurner feed from it.  Then select "Publicize your feed", and configure BuzzBoost.

UPDATE 2006-02-26: Note that Typepad can display RSS feeds directly in the sidebar.  To embed RSS feeds in your sidebar, go to Weblogs - Design - Change Content Selections and go to the lower right, you should see a Feeds section where you can add RSS feeds.

Yahoo MyWeb tags

You can see all the tags in one of those visual folksonomy displays at

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?dg=6&dmode=vtags

If you want to search for a particular tag, use

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=TAG e.g.

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=folksonomy

via Library Stuff

delicious bookmarks get even more tasty

In case you haven't been playing with del.icio.us in a while, you might want to go and check it out again.
It has added automatic suggested expansion of tags, so instead of me having to type Service-Oriented_Architecture I just type "ser" and then the suggestion is correct so I hit TAB to have it filled in (it took me a while to figure out to hit tab).

You can also see my bookmarks with a sort of tag cloud.

You can also see the most popular postings for tags, if there are enough bookmarks with that tag.  For example http://del.icio.us/popular/folksonomy

UPDATE: Via Macintouch today, I found that Ruben R. Puentedura has done a presentation A Moveable Feast: the del.icio.us web.  It is available as PDF, and as MP3 audio.  As well, he did a report on how to generate maps of del.icio.us using some MacOS X tools.

I suppose while I'm in the folksonomy space, I should mention Gataga, a federated search for bookmark tagging systems.

SLA2005 - post-a-palooza - 229 postings

Carolyne boggles my mind with...

After hunting around and finding and then losing SLA 2005 blog postings I decided to put them all here. Enjoy.

229 posts I have found and marked already

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/carolyne