Science Library Pad

the social shotgun: blasting your updates everywhere

In the library world we would probably call this something like "federated updating".
With the proliferation of different targets, particularly different social presence sites, people are trying to do one-to-many updates.

We see an example of some infrastructure for this in Yahoo's FireEagle, for collecting and redistributing location updates.

There was also a nice example at the CRIG Repository Challenge, called FileBlast, which allows you to upload a paper (an article) and then send automatic notices with the link to the paper to multiple sources, such as Twitter and your blog.  It is build on the FeedForward infrastructure, and you can read more about it (as well as find a link to the code) in the FeedForward blog.

Today, via the Outsell Headlines feed, I find news that TypePad has a new Facebook app called Blog It, which  can send a single update to many sources of your choosing, including various blogging platforms (TypePad, Blogger, LJ, Vox, WordPress) and various "statusy" services, including Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook status itself.

UPDATE: The article Outsell pointed me to, Six Apart Gives Facebook Bloggers Blastability, uses the term "lifestreaming".  I wonder if this is where we're headed, from the blog to the lifeblast.  ENDUPDATE

I think there's always this tension between decentralisation and centralisation, and these kind of notification federations may be one way that we manage this.

In particular, "article blast" to multiple repositories using SWORD may be a very compelling solution to a lot of ingest and content recruitment issues.  (And feel free to contact me if you're interested in SWORD ingest across platforms.)  Julie Allinson did a great job of introducing SWORD in her Open Repositories 2008 presentation.

OR08 - the presentation layer is destroying our data

I have lots of raw notes, but I'll wait to see whether the presentations show up at the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository (for some reason, I keep wanting to spell this "respository").

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

One of the main themes that I've heard in terms of doing science with repositories over the past couple days is that presentation formats, particularly PDF, are destroying the data (e.g. chemical structures and reactions) that we have so carefully assembled.  Then we have to make machines work really hard to try to reconstruct this data, which is madness to me (although I accept it may be the only practical solution in the near term).

I would argue that HTML plays a similar role in emphasizing "what looks good" rather than adding to that "and is also usable by machines under the hood".

And in a different way, PowerPoint, with its constraints of display and its style of bullet points, discards our complex ideas and presents them in a lossy, radically oversimplified way (with a dependency of course on the skills of the presenters).

Open Repositories 2008

Through an unexpected series of events I find myself going to Open Repositories 2008

http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

The lineup looks great including a keynote from Peter Murray-Rust, and two (!) sessions on Scientific Repositories.

There is also a Repository Challenge for developers with a £2,500 prize, which is like a million US dollars now (finally, Canadians get to make US dollar jokes).  Kudos to David Flanders for leading this "let's just build stuff and see what works" approach.

I will be blogging under tag/category or08, and twittering under hashtag #or08

I made an Upcoming event, mainly because then if you add the machine tag

upcoming:event=455039

to your Flickr photos, it will automatically put in a nice "Taken at Open Repositories 2008" logo.