Planet Nature is an aggregator of all the NPG blogs that post original content. It’s powered by Venus, an actively developed branch of the Planet software.

Venus uses a feed parser to standardise all the feeds into Atom, then XSL templates to transform those feeds into XHTML, Atom, OPML, FOAF and whatever else is needed.

Thanks to Sam Ruby, Venus now supports CSV files as input for the list of subscriptions to aggregate. This means that we can use Google Spreadsheets to collaboratively maintain the list of subscriptions, giving editing permission to whoever needs to be able to edit the list.

With the addition of an extra XSL template, Venus can also produce a simple HTML file listing just the subscriptions. Google can then use that file to produce a Custom Search Engine on the fly, with searches limited to sites linked from the original page. You can see this in the sidebar on Planet Nature.

Also in the sidebar is a Filter based on Yahoo! Pipes. This pipe takes all of the feeds aggregated by Planet Nature and searches them for the given keywords, creating an RSS or JSON feed that you can use to be notified when new entries are posted to NPG blogs matching your chosen keywords.

Planet Nature is an aggregator of all the NPG blogs that post original content. It’s powered by Venus, an actively developed branch of the Planet software.

Venus uses a feed parser to standardise all the feeds into Atom, then XSL templates to transform those feeds into XHTML, Atom, OPML, FOAF and whatever else is needed.

Thanks to Sam Ruby, Venus now supports CSV files as input for the list of subscriptions to aggregate. This means that we can use Google Spreadsheets to collaboratively maintain the list of subscriptions, giving editing permission to whoever needs to be able to edit the list.

With the addition of an extra XSL template, Venus can also produce a simple HTML file listing just the subscriptions. Google can then use that file to produce a Custom Search Engine on the fly, with searches limited to sites linked from the original page. You can see this in the sidebar on Planet Nature.

Also in the sidebar is a Filter based on Yahoo! Pipes. This pipe takes all of the feeds aggregated by Planet Nature and searches them for the given keywords, creating an RSS or JSON feed that you can use to be notified when new entries are posted to NPG blogs matching your chosen keywords.

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

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

If you’re attending XTech 2007 next week, or just happen to be in Paris on Tuesday evening, come along to the Science BOF session – it’s open to anyone who’s interested.

To quote Heather Piwowar: “”https://researchremix.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/bof-online-distribution-of-scientific-research/“>Paris, springtime, and a birds-of-a-feature session about sharing research data online. Does it get any better than that?!?”

If you’re attending XTech 2007 next week, or just happen to be in Paris on Tuesday evening, come along to the Science BOF session – it’s open to anyone who’s interested.

To quote Heather Piwowar: “”https://researchremix.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/bof-online-distribution-of-scientific-research/“>Paris, springtime, and a birds-of-a-feature session about sharing research data online. Does it get any better than that?!?”

Last week on Inside Higher Ed there was an article by Scott McLemee describing his wishlist for an ‘academic aggregator’ that would both a) collate new information from the web of academic publishing into one place and b) allow people to build directories of links on academic topics.

The follow-up discussion on Crooked Timber and elsewhere (Long Sunday, Epiphatic Exhaustion) seemed to agree this would be a useful idea to put into practice and—coincidentally—it was along the same lines as something I’d been playing with already. To see if it’s really an idea that could work, I’ve put a test site online: Aggademia [update: the site’s down for now – it should be back in a better form at some point].

Using Aggademia, you can

1. browse through blog posts (aggregated from most of the top 50 popular science blogs, as published in Nature last week) and vote on items (up/down or 1-5: either works, but only the up/down votes are counted in the ‘popular’ list at the moment) and
2. create or join existing groups on particular topics. The owner of a group can edit the official list of links for that topic (using the ‘Related Links’ box in the ‘edit’ tab for the group), while other members of the group can make suggestions for useful topic-related links (using ‘create weblink’ in the group sidebar). To join a group, click ‘subscribe’ in the group sidebar on the right-hand side.

The aggregation and voting are still very basic and need lots of extra features to be really useful, but this was just a quick experiment to explore what could be done. Comments and suggestions are welcome either in this post or on your own weblog.

As this is my first post, an introduction: I’m Alf Eaton and I started working with Nature’s Web Publishing group recently, where I will be experimenting with social software and information management tools for scientists. Previously I have made contributions to online systems for publishing scientific articles, as well as creating the biomedical literature search site HubMed.

Last week on Inside Higher Ed there was an article by Scott McLemee describing his wishlist for an ‘academic aggregator’ that would both a) collate new information from the web of academic publishing into one place and b) allow people to build directories of links on academic topics.

The follow-up discussion on Crooked Timber and elsewhere (Long Sunday, Epiphatic Exhaustion) seemed to agree this would be a useful idea to put into practice and—coincidentally—it was along the same lines as something I’d been playing with already. To see if it’s really an idea that could work, I’ve put a test site online: Aggademia [update: the site’s down for now – it should be back in a better form at some point].

Using Aggademia, you can

1. browse through blog posts (aggregated from most of the top 50 popular science blogs, as published in Nature last week) and vote on items (up/down or 1-5: either works, but only the up/down votes are counted in the ‘popular’ list at the moment) and
2. create or join existing groups on particular topics. The owner of a group can edit the official list of links for that topic (using the ‘Related Links’ box in the ‘edit’ tab for the group), while other members of the group can make suggestions for useful topic-related links (using ‘create weblink’ in the group sidebar). To join a group, click ‘subscribe’ in the group sidebar on the right-hand side.

The aggregation and voting are still very basic and need lots of extra features to be really useful, but this was just a quick experiment to explore what could be done. Comments and suggestions are welcome either in this post or on your own weblog.

As this is my first post, an introduction: I’m Alf Eaton and I started working with Nature’s Web Publishing group recently, where I will be experimenting with social software and information management tools for scientists. Previously I have made contributions to online systems for publishing scientific articles, as well as creating the biomedical literature search site HubMed.