Welcome to part three of tracking. First up Postgenomic, the appropriately named meme agregator for science weblogs. It is early days yet with not many 'science blogs' out there. However Stew seems to be making incremental progress with new hosting from Seed media, an update on the review metadata page (which I should implement here), a blog, developer's mailing list , and the code is also available . So go download the pipeline and try out your favorite text mining algorithms (I you know you have a favourite), get very afraid about bioinformatics file format standards development when you realise how bad syndication technologies are in the wild. Read on for more tips...
Collaborative tagging for science has been discussed before on nodalpoint and I have been waiting to see an implementation for tagging publications. Of course journals won't let you do this (let users categorize scientific publications ? are you nuts), however those clever chaps over at the Nature new technology group have implemented tagging in the eprints institutional repository software. You can read Timo Hannoys post on it over at the tagsonomy blog (via OA , via nascent). They have a nice demo where all papers in a particular eprints repository are
taggable, and the application also links up with connotea (naturally). Tagging has yet to appear in the mainstream journals but the possiblity is looking a lot closer.
Last but not least is Bibliography Management using RSS Technology (BuRST), from the specification:
BuRST is a lightweight specification for publishing bibliographic information using RSS 1.0 and bibliography-related metadata standards.
Finding the one true format for marking up citation/bibliographic data will be a never-ending quest I suspect. Connotea syndicates with their own mix of RDF/RSS vocabularies, there is bibtex, NCBI's pubmed format, strong arguments for MODS from Bruce D'Arcus, add to the mix microformats, semantic web vocabularies (also from Bruce) and structured blogging and the whole sceen can get quite confusing. Unfortunately bibliographic management is terribly unsexy, so not a lot of people like to spend their spare time (what little of it we all have) on figuring out the whole mess. I'll leave the actual bibliographic management applications for another post.
