Its interesting how cultures and communities are regarded. This email is about metadata (worthy, but boring), RSS (yet another acronym, and hence nerdish) and Blogging (a turn off for purists, a revolution for others).
From what I can gather, the chemistry community has not (at least overtly) adopted any of these with any enthusiasm. The purpose of this email is to convince you that I think enthusiasm deserved. So, if I have caught your attention, let us proceed.
Once upon a time, Web sites were controlled by Webmasters, and some over a period of time become "must visit" sites, others less so. Content was king, as the saying goes. Then static content started being replaced by dynamic content, generated from databases etc; a popular combination nowadays is PHP/MySQL. The poor user had to visit almost on a daily basis to get the most out of the site, and of course it did not scale (no-one has to the time to visit even a few sites on a regular basis). The problem was "metadata", ie how did you find out if the site (in its daily reincarnation) might be of interest? Then, about 1999, Netscape, followed by others, introduced "Web Logging", pronounced "Blogging". This is essentially a regularly updated (probably daily) diary of items and events, probably written by an individual, and disseminated via a personal web server. Suddenly faced with perhaps having to visit 1000s or more web sites, the blogging community woke up to "metadata". A standard (by then based on XML) for specifying this was invented, called RSS. Being more a cultural phenomenon (and not invented by computer scientists, who looked down on much of this) it almost inevitably bifurcated into RSS 1.0 (the purist camp, who based it on a standard known as RDF) and RSS 2.0 (yes, its confusing, based on an "easy to use" version proposed by Dave Winer). There are many ways of thinking about RSS; the one I find most rewarding is to think of it doing for hyperlinks what HTML did for content, ie it provides a formal link management format which separates most importantly the content from the manner in which it is presented to the user. So, a Blog can now promote its presence by offering what is called an RSS feed (or channel) with carefully crafted metadata indicating what items there are, when/where they were posted, who wrote them, and (perhaps most importantly) what can be done with them and how they relate to each other RSS channels can now be aggregated, or organised into subjects, themes, communities etc, using RSS aggregators (of which there are around 10 now for various OS platforms). You can also search for them using "syndicators" and also perform Google like searches on just them (and not the web in general). So why should the chemistry community generate enthusiasm about RSS? Well, think of a published chemistry journal. Its really just a very high class Blog (which is enhanced with peer review, etc). You as reader can perhaps visit 5 e-journals a day and check to see what is new. But often, you will only do two things a) look at the graphical abstract, or table of contents b) prize open an Acrobat file to see if you are really interested in it. The latter has the undesirable consequence that after several years of doing this, you will have perhaps 1000 un-manageable Acrobat files on your hard disk (yes, I know you can organise them with EndNote, but in truth, its a pretty primitive system). Far better then to create an RSS entry for each new journal article, and have the user subscribe to the journal "channel". So here I issue my first rallying call. Can I urge all chemistry journals to offer an RSS feed or channel for their readers? If you have managed to read this far, you are probably wishing for some examples. so, invoke the following link http://purl.org/net/syndication/subscribe/?rss=http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/... This takes you to a syndicator, and it will check (actually XML validate) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/index.rss, this being the RSS feed for my Blog (well, previously known as Web page). It will offer you information about 9 RSS clients or aggregators, and if you have them installed, it will insert this feed into your local copy. You do this to all RSS feeds you wish to have (say about 100?) including the journals I encouraged above! You leave this program running, and it will periodically check to see what is new and alert you. Some RSS clients will do more (much more is promised!). NewsMonster will index and archive the RSS feeds, so that you (will be able to) search the entire aggregate, and also archive so that entries that scroll off the bottom remain on your hard disk. Arguably, you need no longer download those Acrobat files, but merely ensure you have a pointer to them so that you can access them whenever you need. This is not the place to go into what else can be achieved with RSS (being XML, it can be manipulated in astounding ways), how it is created, how it can be extended etc; a more formal article is on its way exploring this in a chemical sense. So, to find out how/whether RSS is useful to chemists, can I issue my second rallying call Will all chemistry content provider who have new and interesting announcements to make on web sites consider putting up an RSS feed For example, http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/syn-sub/?rss=http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/motm/index.rss will announce new entries for our local Molecules of the Month pages. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)