What about using Mugshot in bioinformatics?

Hi to everybody,
first of all, I would like to apologize if this could seem as a spam message, but it's not.

Recently I've found about this program: mugshot, which is supposed to be a way to share rss feeds and bookmarks among people, and which is from RedHat, and it's released under the Gnu-GPL license.

I'm not good at explaining things, but in two words, every user can create a group about a topic of his interest, for example a particular program or music, and post bookmarks or rss feeds or other resources to it so the other people partecipating to the same group can get them immediately.

I thought: what if I use the same system to organize my bookmarks and share it with the other people in my laboratory?
For example, I've created a group and called it 'Splicing and Yeast' (http://mugshot.org./group?who=H1y4z5JhlCmx6s), and attached some rss feeds from some citeulike tags, from the fungalgenome blog and some hubmed search results to it, so, it's like using liferea but with the possibility to share the feeds with others.
This is a screenshot of my desktop and of the way I'm using it: http://img148.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mugshotbioinf1di8.png

So, what do you think of this idea? Do other similar services for bioinformatics exist?


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google reader support

Hey ~

I noticed your entry a while back but yesterday we prototyped support for google reader shared items in your mugshot account. Looks like it's going to work out in the next push. Once we release the new version you should be able to set your google reader shared items to be shared with your mugshot network.

Cheers!
~ Bryan


I already use del.icio.us

I already use del.icio.us for sharing links. I think this is a better way to go. If you want to share feeds, Google Reader lets you publish particular tags, and you could bookmark that link in your del.icio.us account so that other people would be aware of it. Or you could just bookmark the RSS feed itself.

http://del.icio.us/eweaverp/bioinformatics (my links)
http://del.icio.us/network/eweaverp (links of people I am tracking)


but del.icio.us is meant only for bookmarks

Ok, but del.icio.us is meant only for bookmarks, and if you want to share a reference to an article you have to use a different tool like Connotea or CiteULike, so that's not exactly what I was saying.
Moreover I forgot to say that this tool I've posted is already integrated with del.icio.us and Digg, and being an opensource project it could be modified to include other services like connotea.
I don't use google/reader, but it seems sligthly different: it allows to bookmark only RSS Feeds if I'm not wrong.
Anyway, thank you for the links, I will try to follow them for a while.


Well, I use Citeulike, too,

Well, I use Citeulike, too, for papers ( http://www.citeulike.org/user/eweaver ). But you can bookmark a paper in del.icio.us, you just don't get the fancier metadata. I subscribe to my Citeulike watchlist via RSS and get that in Google reader.

It was hard for me to tell how you intended to use Mugshot from your post. Is it an external feed aggregator? Do you post links directly to it? Are other people expected to add feeds or links, or just you? The Mugshot interface seems totally confusing. I guess if Mugshot just aggregates your existing feeds so that people can just subscribe to that, that's fine. I kind of prefer just the individual feed URLs in an OPML file, though.


mugshot - let me try to explain again ;)

mmm let me try again ;) :
- You create a group of something of your interests, for example 'Bioinformatics', 'Splicing', 'Genomics', etc..
- You can also add feeds, del.icio.us tags and links to the group;
- Other people can join the same group and add their feeds, comments, chat about their contents, and so on.
- the program is integrated with many social-network tools like digg, last.fm, flickr, youtube, etc..: too bad it's not meant for bioinformaticist, but for standard users;
- You can download a client which works like a rss reader, like liferea or blam, and give you notifications on your desktop when a new article or a change from an rss feed arrives; the feeds and all the infos about users are saved in the server of mugshot.org (their EULA is not very clear about how they will respect privacy, to be honest).

So it could be nice if it could be used in bioinformatics, expecially if it could be modified to include connotea and citeulike.
I agree that the interface is too messy (I still didn't managed to understand how to use many things), but I've been told that it was worst earlier, when the project has started.
So I think I will try it for a while, and if I see some interesting improvement I will let you know.


Interesting, I signed up and

Interesting, I signed up and created a microarray group . I tend to agree with eweaver, the interface is a little confusing, and I'm not sure exactly how you are supposed to use groups. For example will a group aggregated the feeds I add and all the events from my on-line activities (i.e. possibly unrelated stuff).

Nonetheless, just because the implementation isn't so great doesn't me that what you are suggesting conceptually is off the mark. What I think you really want is a meta-aggregator system that allows a group of people to create a topic specific aggregator. That group can then feed and share content through the aggregator ?