Being on holiday does evil things to my RSS feed.<\/p>\n
\nI like to keep abreast of the relevant literature as it is published (read: comes online), and RSS is a great way of doing that. But when I’ve had a break from the work Mac (if not actually from work) then it’s a bit depressing to find thirteen hundred items across my various feeds–and that’s before looking at all the weblogs in the ‘Personal’ toolbar folder.<\/p>\n
\nWhile the first day back in the lab\/office is usually spent deleting emails I’ve already read and catching up with gossip\/hiding from the boss, that is an imperial shedload of reading to do, even if it is reduced to skimming titles. With the surfeit of scientific information available today it’s becoming impossible to keep track of what’s being published even without time off: and if Web 2.0<\/a> means that we’ll be seeing yet more<\/em> published items (_pace_ Cameron<\/a> and Jean-Claude<\/a> ) then it’s just going to get worse.<\/p>\n \nAnd this is why search-based methods are so popular. Instead of browsing various journals once a week for interesting stuff, it makes more sense to construct a search, let the computer take the strain, and get the results mailed back to you (or delivered in your RSS reader). This is the way my new gig, Faculty of 1000<\/a>, is going: browsing will be possible but we want you to search<\/em>, rather than simply hoping for something interesting to fall out and smack you in the face.<\/p>\n \nHow we actually do that is part of my brief. I also want to somehow retain the major advantage of browsing, which is how we stumble across interesting things that we weren’t necessarily specifically looking for.<\/p>\n \nReading weblogs is going to be pretty refactory to the search-based method, however. I see them as more of an archived on-going conversation-type thing, and the algorithm that says, ‘Oi, rpg: you might find this interesting’ isn’t ready for prime-time yet. I did, this morning, mark all the ‘personal’ stuff in my RSS feed as read, too; so if you’ve written something you think I would have been interested in but I haven’t done you the honour of commenting, then please let me know.<\/p>\n \nAnd speaking of weblogs, I’ll be talking with various people in the next few weeks and hoping to set one up at F1000. I’ll let you know when it’s live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Being on holiday does evil things to my RSS feed. I like to keep abreast of the relevant literature as it is published (read: comes online), and RSS is a great way of doing that. But when I’ve had a … Continue reading