Well, believe it or not, today is this weblog's first anniversary. Over that year I've written nearly a thousand posts. I've put a lot of effort into this, but I've gotten even more out of my involvement in this growing place we like to call the blogosphere. A year ago today I wrote,
Now the Web, and tools such as weblogs in particular, is making the feedback loops shorter, so that increasingly we are perceiving first-hand that the value of what we are expressing can reach beyond a restricted circle of acquaintances. In effect, we are collaborating with people that we don't know (yet). The long now is contracting and we are becoming conscious of a "wider here". I think in time this will drive many people to try and do their best in terms of making their output usable by a wider audience.
Indeed, in the months that followed, the process I had described began happening to me. Serendipity brought a lot of strangers to pass by and read some of the words I'd put here. Many of them became collaborators, co-conspirators, friends even. And the best thing is I didn't even have to try and pretend to be someone else! And while a lot of things havebeenmoving in my life recently, the little corner of the blogosphere that I know provided a kind of stable mental anchoring point.
So, my deepest thanks to you all for listening and/or caring. If it hadn't been for your attention and generosity with your own thoughts, for your words of encouragement, and for the patience you obviously showed when the outpour was reduced - I wouldn't still be out here thinking out loud, trying to connect whatever small pieces I can put my hands on in ways that are meaningful to me. And I wouldn't put nearly as much trust in people I don't know (yet) as I do now.
I have a possibly odd RSS application: I use RSS to keep track of my schedule. I have an “RSS feed” that shows me my todo items, upcoming calendar events, and some other stuff.
I have a feeling that using RSS for this is either a really clever idea or a really stupid one, but I'm not sure which. Anyway, it's working for me. It means that everytime I peek at my RSS viewer, I see my schedule.
I lean towards the former. This sounds brilliant. I use RemindMe to remember the important events to come. Right now it sends me emails. Wouldn't it be great if it could provide an RSS feed that features the important events of a day, on the day before they happen?
This innovation allows readers to navigate back and forth smoothly between scholarly articles that cite one another. Interestingly, Hubmed is leading commercial publishers here.
Alf Eaton, who put it together:
BioMed Central links. Now here's a real benefit of publishing your paper in an open-access journal. BioMed Central made the full text of all their published articles available for download as XML files, which means that all the sections are marked up and machine-readable, including the author names, titles, PubMed ID numbers and bibliographies. Running a small Perl script through these files, sending Trackbacks from one article to another, lets HubMed now display the full list of references for each article - in both directions. [...] This is a great resource, previously only partially available through a costly subscription (and gnarly interface) to ISI's Web of Knowledge, and a lead which I hope commercial, paid-access publishers will begin to follow as soon as possible. Update: I should have added... [HubLog]
This is a break-through development. [...] Until now, reference linking was an "inessential" that seemed too expensive to provide for open-access texts. BMC's willingness to provide free XML files as data, and Alf Eaton's programming skill, have changed this and put reference linking within the reach of open-access journals and archives.
As Alf again shows, brains and know-how can sometimes prove an effectively substitute for money. Great job!
