Scintillation

Clustering of Hot Topics

2007-11-14T10:06:53Z

The 'Hot Topics' clusters on the left-hand side of the front page represents stories that have shown a recent burst of activity, above their mean for the last 30 days. Key phrases extracted from each item are monitored, and if they appear over a threshold level then stories attached to that phrase are used as Hot Topics.

Previously phrases were clustered around items, which meant that often two separate stories would be inappropriately clustered together; now the clustering code has been rewritten to group items around phrases, which so far seems to work much better.

Hopefully the interesting, bursting topics on the front page will now be more clearly defined and easier to read.

arXiv searches

2007-11-13T10:41:36Z

Thanks to the new arXiv API, we've been able to add arXiv search to Scintilla. At the moment saved searches aren't enabled, but once the API is updated to allow search results to be sorted by date this will be added.

Bookmarklets

2007-11-02T15:50:50Z

There are a couple of very useful bookmarklets on Scintilla's 'tips' page. The first - "Find in Scintilla" - is for when you've followed a link to read a story on the original site, or just ended up on a science blog post while wandering around the web, and want to get to that item on Scintilla in order to rate that story or recommend it to someone. Click the bookmarklet and if that item is found in Scintilla you'll be taken straight to it.

If the item unfortunately isn't found in Scintilla, it might be brand new and hasn't been indexed yet, or the source might not have been added to Scintilla. In the latter case, let us know and we'll look into adding the source as soon as possible.

The second bookmarklet takes the text you select on any web page and runs a "More Like This" analysis against Scintilla's index of blog posts and news items. This is a good way of quickly finding more items that discuss topics similar to the page you're currently reading.

Network feeds

2007-11-02T15:44:13Z

There are now Atom feeds for 'items recommended to your groups' (available from the Groups tab of your profile page) and 'items recommended directly to you' (available from your profile page). This should make it easier to keep track of stories that your network has found interesting enough to manually recommend.

There's also an option available in your preferences to enable email alerts when someone in your network sends you a manual recommendation.

New design

2007-11-02T15:40:47Z

A couple of weeks ago Scintilla switched over to a new look, thanks to NPG's design team. Hopefully everything should be working smoothly, but if you find any problems do let us know.

There's an option in the Edit tab of your profile to switch back to the old theme, if you preferred things that way.

Comparing Google Reader's plans with Scintilla

2007-09-17T05:44:19Z

According to reports of a video accidentally leaked from inside Google, the Google Reader developers have interesting plans for the future. While Scintilla works on a different scale from Google Reader (which is said to store "10 terabytes of raw data from 8 million feeds") and also doesn't aim for the same niche of general-purpose feed reader, there are proposals reported that would help aggregation sites like Scintilla, as well as several features that we've already implemented. Here's a selection of the most interesting:

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Google will work on a standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed ('this post has been deleted', etc.). This will be really useful: at the moment Scintilla stores aggregated items even if they disappear from the original feed (we will of course manually delete an item if requested, but this inconvenience makes it harder for an author to retract a post when necessary). The way it works at the moment, if an item is updated in a feed within a week of the original creation date, the item will also be updated in Scintilla. Ideally authors should have control over how their content is aggregated elsewhere, and should be able to delete or make changes to that content at a later date as easily as possible.

The Reader team is going to integrate more social features. Definitely a useful feature for allowing interesting, timely information to flow through social networks. Scintilla has a full social network of groups and individuals, through which information flows both manually (by recommending an item directly to a group or individual) or automatically (by Scintilla's algorithmic recommendation of items, sources, groups and users based on item ratings and each user's social network).

Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity. While Scintilla's user profiles aren't yet integrated with activity on the rest of nature.com, Scintilla recommends sources based on common sources shared with other users. These can be found in the sidebar on the Manage Sources page.

Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share. Scintilla deliberately doesn't do this, believing that comments on articles should be collected in one place, at the original source. The groups and discussion forums at Nature Network, however, are always available for wider discussion of topics in the news.

When searching in Reader, you may also get results from before you aren't subscribed to anymore, or from your friends' items. At the moment, searching in Scintilla is always global, but searching across just your saved sources - or those of your social network - is a useful feature that will hopefully be added to Scintilla in the future. Google's on-the-fly Custom Search Engine feature could easily provide this in the short-term.

Google wants to make publishing full articles in feeds more interesting to webmasters by creating ways to monetize them. Luckily a lot of scientific bloggers are able to see the benefits of including the full content in their feeds. This makes sure that their articles show up in saved searches across the content aggregated by Scintilla, and also allows Scintilla to display Adsense text ads (from Google) alongside their claimed content, if they desire. The revenue from these adverts goes solely to the authors - this process is described in more detail on the Information for Content Producers page.

Groups on Scintilla

2007-08-18T09:30:38Z

Perhaps you already use Scintilla to keep track of papers, news items and blog posts that discuss your particular area of interest. Perhaps you've never heard of Scintilla before (in which case you should give it a go).

Maybe, though, you tried it once but couldn't work out why it'd be worth visiting regularly when you've already got PubMed email alerts, an RSS reader and Google Blogsearch working just the way you want them to?

If that's the case then (a) congratulations, you're more web savvy than the vast majority of other scientists (or maybe just better organized) and (b) you're still missing out.

Social features have been an important part of Scintilla since the project began. We can and do work on algorithms to present you with information that we think you need or might like but right now the best sources of recommendations are people who know you - your contacts on the site.

Once you join groups and build up a network on Scintilla you start to get much more out of it. It's still a little bit harder than it should be - we're aware of that, but it's one of the drawbacks of a release early, release often approach we took. Over time you'll see better integration with places like Nature Network and Connotea.

At the moment most of the groups on Scintilla are communities of interest - Open Science and Best of the Blogs are two popular groups to which members recommend relevant blog posts, articles and papers.

Alternatively check out some pretty pictures collected from blog posts - the one above is of Mira's recently discovered 'tail' - or the many ways that we're all going to die.

Do have a browse around. It's more work orientated than Facebook and less boring than an eTOC (ah, excepting Nature's, of course).

Scintilla

2007-06-12T08:37:21Z

Yesterday we opened up a new site, Scintilla, to the public.

Scintilla is an aggregator—of science weblogs, news stories and publication databases—but it works in a slightly different way from the existing online RSS readers that cover the whole internet. For a start, the sources are manually selected, and only related to science, so there shouldn't be any trouble with spam when searching for stories. Also there's no 'unread items' count, so you don't have to feel like you have lots of reading to catch up on. Browse the site, add sources to your collection, and visit your 'Read' page on Scintilla whenever you're looking for some juicy science stories to read.

The other important feature of Scintilla is ratings and recommendations. As you're browsing through stories or papers, give them a quick rating: high if you think it's interesting and you'd like to read more like this, low if it's not your cup of tea. These ratings will be analysed alongside everyone else's and used to recommend stories that you might like (if other people liked the same stories as you, you'll hopefully like the other things they found interesting as well).

You can also manually recommend stories to other people: either to individual members of your social network, or to groups that you've joined. There are already groups for bioinformatics, pop science, images, visualisation and open science, but if your speciality isn't covered then feel free to start up a group and invite your colleagues to join. The more interesting people in your network, the better your recommendations will be :-)

A quick note: we sent emails about Scintilla to a selection of bloggers, but it's hard to find contact details for 600 or so weblogs. For everyone we didn't manage to contact directly, please join the mailing list/discussion group and/or send feedback to scintilla@nature.com