Tracking blogs from nature.com and beyond
... ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life ... (from Nature's original mission statement)
I'll skip the PR blurb in favour of some good old fashion techie bullet points:
- Nature Blogs is a blogroll of good quality science blogs (quality is a relative term, but there's no spam or pseudoscience and little press release regurgitation)
- To get onto the blogroll you need to submit your blog
- You can log in to the site with your Network or nature.com username and password then claim any blogs that you own.
- The blogroll is moderated by the community (once you've submitted and claimed a blog you get to vote on submissions)
- To be included in link backs from articles you need to be on the blogroll
- It uses Scintilla to aggregate posts from all of the blogs on the blogroll
- then clusters them into stories - groups of related posts.
- We're trying out Twitter as an alternate view on the stories data - if you follow the NatureBlogs user then a couple of times a week it'll point you to particularly interesting stories you might have missed. You can also find twittering bloggers by watching NatureBlogs' following list.
- It uses Connotea's WebCite web service to work out what links in posts are to scientific articles.
We're just getting started and there'll be more developments as other aspects of NPG's blogging strategy come together.
The next release in a couple of weeks will focus on usability issues and bugs - we know there are a few! - and on the API, which I hope you'll find useful in your own sites and mashups. Some undocumented previews (schemas and content are liable to change):
- download blogroll in CSV format for your own projects
- link to page of posts talking about the paper with DOI 10.1136/bmj.a1938
- that data in JSON format
- and in Atom
I'm keen to hear any criticisms, bug reports and feature requests - as blog readers you are the target audience after all - so do feel free to email me on blogs@nature.com or direct message natureblogs on Twitter with your feedback!
Comments
As a blogger, would it be possible to use tags to select a subset of your posts to send over to Nature Blogs? For example, maybe I could opt to share only those items that I think would be useful to Nature readers while filtering out those posts that are less appropriate. The last two posts in my blog might be a good example of one that might belong in your blogroll and one that probably doesn't. You could add a tag-based filtering component to the 'for bloggers' section that would let people like me specify what kinds of posts we really want to share with the Nature Blogroll. I could choose tags like 'Nature' or 'semantic web' as positives and tags like 'election' or 'recipes' as negatives. This would save me the trouble of setting up multiple blogs while keeping me free to write about what I am thinking - scientifically relevant or not.
Posted by: Benjamin Good | November 9, 2008 11:26 AM