Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Blog your publications, filter, and burn it right this instant

I've started blogging rather late but I quickly realized that it can be used to publish/distribute information much faster than traditional schemes. After a while I thought such a scheme could be adopted for research articles. Therefore, I've set up a blog for our research group comprising our articles published elsewhere. Each entry is categorized based on the type of publication (workshop, conference, journal, etc.) and to which project it can be associated (and acknowledged). Interestingly, one can comment on each article providing direct feedback to the authors paving a new way of a scientific discourse. With Yahoo Pipes one can filter the content of the blog (more precisely its RSS feed) according to certain criteria. For example, publications written within a certain project can be re-distributed on another Web site from a centralized database (i.e., the blog). Before doing so, I've used another service called Feedburner (now acquired by Google) which allows smooth re-purposing of RSS feeds. For example, I've incorporated a headline animator to our group's web site.

ITEC MMC Publications

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Furthermore, the newest publications appear on our publication's Web site in full length with some built-in interactivity (e.g., save to del.icio.us, share on Facebook, etc.) thanks to Feedburner. Finally, any update on this blog is fed into Twitter via Twitterfeed every half an hour or so. Twitter updates itself can be incorporated into any Web site as HTML or even Flash. Also, bookmarks related to conferences, workshops, etc. from some group members (e.g., timse7, itecmmc) are aggregated using Yahoo Pipes, burnt with Feedburner, re-purposed at our link's Web site, and, finally, fed into Twitter. Wow, and everything with a few clicks without any/much coding (okay, okay, you have to copy/paste some HTML snippets but this is doable for everyone, I guess). Long live Web 2.0.... would be interesting to see such an approach being fully adopted within IEEE Computing Now!

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