Dave Munger › Likes

It's relevant to ask whether people who work at hosting companies feel like they're being watched regarding what sites they put up at that host. AFAIK, they don't. So why do people at Nature blogs feel this way? Maybe blogs should be independent? - Mr. Gunn from Android

@Mr Gunn or do like sciblogs.co.nz does: we were able to choose whether to build our blogs 'inside' or outside. For those of us that have our blogs outside, the content gets sucked into and reposted on sciblogs site with the sciblogs 'look'. I think it is a nice balance of 'independence' and 'aggregation'. - Kubke

Agreed. Aggregators are great, but you can have aggregators without a conflict of interest - those that provide pure hosting, for example. I think #pepsigate is an example of why this is valuable. - Mr. Gunn

Ok, since there is heaps being written about blogging/aggregation etc, here is an idea: What if we were to start an account (or a group) called e.g. science blogs in FF. How a blog gets fed into it could be decided for some sort of 'filtering' or 'quality control' (or not): for example, can the owner of the blog ask to be added, or should someone else nominate them, or does the blogger... more... - Kubke

Nice idea. My problem is that the way FF aggregates RSS feeds is poor - title and link only, no images, no text. This makes it an unattractive solution, but I fully support the principle. OTOH, I'm not in favour of setting up another destination (such as a BuddyPress site) - aggregation needs to happen within existing networks, not split attention. - AJCann

I agree with the ff issue with rss, but if my blog were to be aggregated I might make the effort to provide full title and first paragraph in the comments. (but no big deal if I don't). It would be up to the blogger to make that effort. One nice thing of FF is being able to pull it into wherever you want. - Kubke

True, but few people would bother to annotate the FF page. For sustainability, aggregation should be an automated process, not aggregation + manual editing. - AJCann

So you think it might be worthwhile doing but it in a place that shows more info? Do you know of one? - Kubke

OK, give it a try. The catchy title of the FF group is? However, I'd like to use the science tag from my blog rather than the base feed so I can filter content appropriately. - AJCann

OK, added 2 blogs in, invited you both (AJ and Neil). Let me know what you think. - Kubke

Well, one may see that as an incentive to make titles more informative? :-) - Björn Brembs

Or very attractive. Where is the group? I haven't had an invitation yet. - AJCann

Good point Björn, but this sort of formatting http://www.facebook.com/Microbi... (forget the sidebars, just the article summaries) is much more attractive than the standard FF RSS aggregation. - AJCann

Made AJCann and Neil admins, invited Bjoern (let me know if you want me to add/remove admin) - Kubke

OK, I'm in. - AJCann

Just a note that if you use 'custom RSS' rather than blog import you can get the first paragraph in automatically, particularly if there is an abstract element in the RSS feed - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

Thanks Cameron, I am inviting you and customising a few to see how it works - Kubke

Still can't get custom RSS to work for Blogger tags, works fine for WordPress. - AJCann

this is what cameron's look like on custom rss http://feeds.feedburner.com/Science... - Kubke

OK, done transferign all existing feeds into custom feeds. The only one that doesn't seem to work is AJCann's. (anyone has an idea). Right now it is closed, any of the members can invite others, and I have been making you admins as you popped in (can remove you from that role if you want). So, also any of you can make any other an admin (I think) and change the settings of the group. I have to do laundy and pack to go stalk intelligent people in California. - Kubke

@AJCann: here are example RSS feeds for tagged posts in my blog: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs... - Egon Willighagen

e.g. one of your labels: http://scienceoftheinvisible.b... - Egon Willighagen

Let me know whenever the group is public. will like to join! - Sandeep Gautam

BTW, ResearchBlogging has done a very good job of aggregating peer-reviewed research; cant we extend the same concept / have a parallel diluted version of ResearchBlogging , say ScienceBlogging , which has equally rigorous inclusion criteria, but does not necessarily needs the posts to be peer-reviewed (only the blogger, herself, to be peer-reviewed:-) ; having all the good science blog... more... - Sandeep Gautam

@Sandeep Research Blogging is great, but there is a lot of blogging that does not go in there. The problem with trying to set up something like research blogging is... well... trying to set up and host something like research blogging! A FF group tha taggregates blots would automatically move posts to the top based on likes and comments of the readers. The community would eventually end... more... - Kubke

We've been thinking about doing something like what Sandeep suggests at ResearchBlogging. The nice thing about that is that we already have a huge database of blogs and their RSS addresses, and they are already roughly categorized. The difficulty would be getting bloggers to tag individual posts when they don't fit into the broad categories they have chosen for the blogs (and, of course, administering the whole thing). - Dave Munger

The problem with I see with a friendfeed group would be managing the huge flow of information. I would guess that you'd be easily talking about hundreds of posts per day. Can the FF group organize all this by category? - Dave Munger

There are no sub-groupings in FF groups, but the architecture of FF is designed to filter large amounts of information. Personally, I'm not convinced FF is the best solution to this, but it might be the best available at present? We are looking for alternatives here. - AJCann

@Dave not sure you can do that but one could create 'groups' (blogs of Neuroscience, Blogs of microbiology, etc). Also remember that you can always opt of not having the group feed come into your home page, and just go open it at your leisure. What got me frustrated with all this #pepsigate was the idea of thousands of people changing each RSS feed by hand. That is a lot of wasted time! - Kubke

I agree FF is a 'dirty' solution but one that has some advantages in my view: commenting and likes (which move the good blogs up) the best of week/best of day feature and that you can opt out of bringing it into your home page, easy updates when URLs change, and being able to import into the group the odd blogpost that may be of interest (but not worth aggregating as a whole). What sucks is the mess and the lack of categories/tagging. - Kubke

Okay folks, here's a group for you. This is all the anthropology feeds from ResearchBlogging.org that were in blogger or wordpress (since I had easier access to their RSS feeds). Would something like this be useful? http://friendfeed.com/science... - Dave Munger

Yes, lets start with blog feeds that are already present in ResearchBlogging feed/DB and add them to diff FF groups- built around subjects like anthropology/psychology/neuroscience etc . for now this can be a valuable seed DB (BTW, no pun on seed here:-) with which to start and we can then decide on more rigorous exclusion/inclusion criteria as we go. - Sandeep Gautam

Here's a more extended blog post with my thoughts about setting up a system on FriendFeed http://wordmunger.com/?p=1378 - Dave Munger

I made the group public (I am off in a few hours on a trip) and posted this message http://friendfeed.com/blogs-a... . Lets see how the experiment works. If it doesn't the group can be destroyed :). I also pointed to the RSS and FB feeds at the bottom of the page (on the description) for those that aren't in FF. - Kubke

"Unfortunately [...] multiple, competing initiatives are forming." Shirley, do you think that is a bad thing perse? Are the groups competing for money or are they competing that their system is better? I have no trouble with Mac/Windows/Linux, Movable Type and Wordpress, IntenseDebate and Disqus, Twitter and FriendFeed, OpenID and Facebook Connect. I think this kind of competition is only bad if it means not one initiative will get enough traction. - Meryn Stol

@Meryn, not necessarily a bad thing, but if the service is meant to be universal, having multiple services probably undermines that goal, at least until something is in place to make all those services interoperable. I actually don't know much as much about this but there's a huge thread on this subject: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Shirley Wu

You might think about it as similar to the DOI system. Would it work if we had multiple digital object ID systems? - Shirley Wu

There are alternatives to DOI (e.g. http://www.sref.org/ ) but not very widely used. I also expect a lack of standardization to prevent wider adoption of author ID schemes. - Daniel Mietchen

DOI is used in about 70 percent of journal articles. If we could get 70 percent adoption of an author ID, it would make a huge difference. - Dave Munger

I like the ResearcherID plan, because they're supporting existing authentication systems like OpenID, so they're more likely to get up and running, sooner - Mr. Gunn

Unless Thomson has changed their terms-of-service for ResearcherID, the conditions and limitations on use and re-use of the ID are too strong for my taste. I did an analysis last year and posted it at http://dltj.org/article... - Peter Murray

@Peter, that's a very astute and useful analysis. Thank you! - Bill Hooker

Things have changed substantially since last year, right? Aren't they now using OpenID and didn't they say that the EULA restrictions were basically boilerplate that they tacked on but didn't intend to have such broad coverage? Am I thinking of one of the other projects instead? - Mr. Gunn

Yes, I only used blog posts in my prep stage. - John Dupuis

I should have mentioned in the post, but I found that the Lessig-y style worked very well for me. I don't really frame things visually like some people do, so using sparse slides with only a few words that emphasized what I was saying seemed natural and flowed well. - John Dupuis

Great presentation! - Jill O'Neill

Thanks, everyone. No audio, unfortunately. - John Dupuis

Top man, John - most excellent !! - Graham Steel

Thanks for the shout-out to ResearchBlogging.org. Looks like it was a great presentation - Dave Munger

Any chance of a transcript, or some notes? (He says, who still hasn't put up notes for his talk last year...) I hate video/audio anyway, give me text or give me dea--er, that is, wind up way down my priority list. - Bill Hooker

Bill, unfortunately, I tend not to do extensive notes, usually just a bit of point form on the print out I use the day-of. Which I tend not to follow. Which is why I've slowly got out of the habit of using notes, because I ignore them anyways. For various reasons, I ended up with very little time to prep this presentation so what I ended up doing to prepare was to study the blog posts I linked to. - John Dupuis

John, my idea was to provide notes with each slide -- ideally after the talk, so that any spontaneous goodness that came up can be included. But that's a bunch of extra work, and as I said I haven't done it myself for my own talks! - Bill Hooker

Bora - Yeah, seems like Gladwell is getting criticised from a lot of points of view. I still enjoyed the book, despite my criticism. - Michael Nielsen

You really nailed it in your comment that although he's not at all rigorous, he does write a heck of a story. - Mr. Gunn

Sounds like another book likely to stimulate thought - whether right or wrong - I'll put it on my list - Jean-Claude Bradley

I will definitely take a look - The Tipping Point really made me think differently so it does not matter if he got all the details wrong, he changed the way I operate. - Bora Zivkovic

Gregory - Anything by Dan Brown? - Mr. Gunn

Bora, Tipping Point also change my thinking for the better. So, at worst it espoused a useful fiction. I've read a bit about elite marathoners, all of which has said that it takes freakish genetics and ten years of running twice a day every day for 10 years to make it to the top. - damian pope