Roddy MacLeod : Activity

Tell 20,000 people about your project

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:17:40 GMT

If members of the Emerge Community have project outcomes to publicise, let me know and I'll try to include details in the next Internet Resources Newsletter. All you need is something which is of interest to the academic community, a URL and a concise summary. The August issue of IRN is just out - so you can see the format.

Word clouds

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:53:22 GMT

Just been playing with Wordle, to create a word cloud from the text of the article about ticTOCs mentioned previously:

ticTOCs disseminates

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:09:08 GMT

There's an article in the new SCONUL Focus about ticTOCs: Taking the pain out of your RSS, by Joe Hilton and Roddy MacLeod, SCONUL Focus, 42, Winter 2007, pp. 42-43.

When the next version of ticTOCs is released in the not too distant future, which will include constantly updated content and some other improvements, it will be all systems go to raise the profile of the service and tell as many people as possible about the advantages of using it.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:12:22 GMT

Here's something to 'power browse' heh heh :-) it's an article in The Atlantic.

ticTOCs Beta 2.0 Check it out!

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:58:22 GMT

I'd like to invite all members of the Emerge community to go to http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ and check out the ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents Beta 2.0 which was released this week.

ticTOCs is now just about a usable service. You can use it in two main ways:

1. As a directory of journal TOC feeds. Once found, you can export feeds individually using the RSS links, or in bulk by using OPML, to your feedreader of choice.

2. As a place where you can locate TOCs, store them, view items in them, go to the full text landing pages, export items to RefWorks, and generally keep up to date with the scholarly journal literature. You'll need to register to use ticTOCs in this way, which I hope you will do.

Numerous further developments to ticTOCs will be made in the future (subject browsing, new content, alerts, information about titles, etc etc). There are now 7,733 TOCs from 72 publishers in ticTOCs, with very good coverage of engineering (because of the link with the Gold Dust project), quite good coverage of library & information science titles, and selected coverage of other subjects.

You may notice when using ticTOCs that whilst many of the TOCs give a lot of information, some don't. This is because some publishers don't include much detail in their RSS feeds. This shows the urgent need for the ticTOCs/CrossRef Recommendations for publishers of journal TOC RSS feeds, which will be published in the future, and which will potentially help anyone who uses journal TOC RSS feeds by encouraging improvements in the standard of content.

If you find any inconsistencies with the way ticTOCs works, or any bugs, please let me know, as we are still testing this release.

Thanks

Roddy

Inforum presentation about RSS, ticTOCs and Gold Dust

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:09:59 GMT

There's a brief report here on the presentation I gave last week at the Inforum Conference, with links to the abstract and slides.

The Aussies create a social network for educators

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:43:09 GMT

me.edu.au provides Australian education and training professionals with an online networking and profile space.

The first release provides:

my profile
my interests which then create and connects you with others with similar interests
my colleagues
display of membership of edna Groups
external rss feeds - show external online activity - show your colleagues what you have been doing online
activity summary.

Conference announcements

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:27:07 GMT

I've noticed several conference announcements on Emerge - which is of course fine, as Emerge provides an interested audience. If you have a forthcoming conference to publicise, you may also think about posting to these two sites:

Eventseer.net RSS feed: http://eventseer.net/feeds/news/

WikiCFP RSS feedhttp://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/rss

Where do YOU find out about possibly interesting conferences? Do announcements sometimes clutter your email in-tray? Do you possibly miss relevant conferences and meetings because you don't know about them? If you're specialising in a particular area, one way or another you probably hear about many relevant conferences. Maybe not - after all, there are many, many places that conferences are announced.

One of the things the Gold Dust project is looking into is making the process of being alerted to relevant conference announcements effortless and automated.

ticTOCs prototype

Tue, 06 May 2008 19:24:44 GMT

Less than ten days to go now, until the release of the new ticTOCs prototype, which we trust will be much improved on the one currently available, and which should enable us to get the service out there and get some good solid feedback, from the likes of yourself, I hope :-)

ticTOCs - Journal Table of Contents Service

Selection of RSS feeds of interest to academics

Tue, 06 May 2008 19:19:50 GMT

I posted here a selection of RSS feeds which should be of interest to academics. All of these feeds, plus many more, will be harvested by the Gold Dust project.