Archive for November, 2004

Communications of the ACM section on “the blogosphere”

Tuesday, November 30th, 2004

(Harvard users follow this link.)  
Includes Bonnie Nardi et al “Why we blog,” Rebecca Blood on software,
Cass Sunstein on democracy, and others.  (Source: Mathemagenic)

New paper by Berg lab

Tuesday, November 30th, 2004

(Harvard users follow this link.)  
Howard Berg and Ady Vaknin published a paper in PNAS on single cell
fluorescent imaging of receptors in the bacterial chemotaxis
system.  An overview of the research can be found on the Berg lab web site

Presentation on corporate blogging

Tuesday, November 30th, 2004

Hats off to Sabrina Pacifici for her comprehensive presentation on
corporate blogs, featuring exhaustive lists of the benefits of blogging
and several interesting examples of organizations using blogs. 
(Source: beSpacific)

Google’s interface to scholarly literature

Thursday, November 18th, 2004

Google now has a search interface for finding journal articles and
books.  Evidently they’ve indexed content from a number of
contributing publishers.  For some, only citations are available,
but Google tells how many other references have cited a particular
work.  It will increasingly expose open access publications, but
proprietary content will still be only partially accessible. (Source:
SPARC Open Access Forum)

Update: The New York Times has an article about the service. 

Update (11/19/04): ResourceShelf and Traffick.com critique Google Scholar. (Source: Library Juice)

About a blog

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

My presentation from the session Blogs and k-logs for information
dissemination and knowledge management at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting
is now available in .pdf.  Keep an eye out, however, for the
excellent presentations by Jessica Baumgart on feeds and Christina
Pikas on blogs for personal knowledge management, which should appear
shortly.  Christina and Jessica contributed a great deal of
material to a blog for the panel as we were preparing for the session
over the last few months.  Thanks to Kris Liberman for organizing us.

Update (11/19/04): Jessica’s presentation is now online, while Christina posted an outline of her slides. 

Librarian pooh poohs blogs and wikipedia

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

Greg Hill has contempt for blogs, and while his point about their
unreliability may have some merit in some cases, he doesn’t mention any
specific sites but provides a caricature.  Wikipedia doesn’t
impress him either, but maybe if Hill provided some examples of
erroneous wiki passages, his piece might be a little more
convincing.  (Source: blogwithoutalibrary)

Library listings of journals with RSS feeds

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

The University of Saskatchewan libraries have compiled an impressive
electronic journals page which features an alphabetical listing of
journals that feature RSS feeds.  (Source: blogwithoutalibrary)

Citation bookmark service

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

CiteULike is similar to del.icio.us in that it enables scientists to
bookmark and create libraries of papers that interest them. 
Additionally, you can look at other people’s citations, browse by
category and receive updates via RSS (source: nodalpoint.org)

A question of balance

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

In “Blinded by science,” Chris Mooney offers examples of how the
journalistic striving for “balance” in scientific articles can give
weight to ideas discredited by the mainstream scientific
community.  (Source: PAMNET-L)

AIP offers open access option

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

but at a cost of $2000 per paper.  It’s called “author
select”  and authors in journals such as Review of Scientific
Instruments, Journal of Mathematical Physics and Chaos may opt for
their papers to be “open access” by paying the fee.  This is
similar to PNAS’ policy (but quite a bit more expensive.) (Source;
SPARC Open Access Forum)