Gold Dust - a private blog for the Gold Dust Project

News from Infovell

Roddy MacLeod — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:38:32 +0000

Latest news here. “Later this year, Infovell will be beta-releasing a free version of its research engine on a limited basis for those individuals who want to search the Deep Web, but don’t have the need for some of the advanced features available in the premium version.”

Next generation environments – papers

Roddy MacLeod — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:23:02 +0000

Simon’s paper about Gold Dust and ticTOCs, given at the Next Generation Environments: Understanding Needs, Unravelling Complexities and Applying Practice Conference, is available (pages 16-17).

Infovell

Roddy MacLeod — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:02:42 +0000

The press release about Infovell, which uses some vaguley similar concepts to Gold Dust, is available.

Roddy

Test of embedding Grazr feed of T & L resources included in Gold Dust

Roddy MacLeod — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:17 +0000

Gold Dust Blog

Simon Hodson — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:03:12 +0000

At the last Gold Dust progress meeting, Roddy commented that he had posted on the GD blog about his INFORUM presentation. He wondered, additionally, whether people were using the blog. Well, imagine my surprise when I found out that, in fact, only five people were enrolled on the blog… An apology is due, I’m afraid I had not realised that this was the case. Anyway, it is a situation that I shall now have to rectify! I have realised equally, that not all participants and partners have access to the project wiki, where I have posted minutes of the Advisory Board meeting and progress meetings.

I have sent joining invitations to all project participants and partners. I shall continue to post project minutes and more formal information in the wiki. I propose that we all use the blog for more ad hoc exchange of information as appropriate. And in particular, perhaps, for news of dissemination activities and publications.

Inforum 2008 presentation

Roddy MacLeod — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:33:29 +0000

A brief report on the Inforum presentation about RSS, ticTOCs and Gold Dust, with links to the slides, is available on the spineless? blog. To this I’d add that I spoke to Aaron Maierhofer, RefWorks, at the conference. Aaron is responsible for RefAware. We both lamented the lack of standardisation in many RSS feeds.

Roddy

Gold Dust diagram

Roddy MacLeod — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:13:55 +0000

Lisa’s Gold Dust diagram may be of interest. Depending on what browser you are using, you may need to mouseover or click to see what’s beneath the boxes.

Roddy

Low use of good feeds

Roddy MacLeod — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:52:56 +0000

I’ve just been checking some engineering professional society RSS feeds for the list in the wiki, and one thing I’ve noticed is how little used some of these feeds seem to be. Bloglines isn’t the only reader, by any means, but the number of subs to a feed in Bloglines gives some indication of its use.

IET News Feed – Manufacturing has 1 subscriber, and IET New Feed – Management has 2. SPIE Electronic Imaging & Signal Processing has 2. I checked that last one with Google Reader, and there are 4 subscribers.

Yet these feeds all contain quite valuable and useful current information from professional societies which have large user bases. These low stats show, I believe, that RSS is not catching on as much as some people would think. It also shows how useful Gold Dust could be, in retrieving relevant content from such material for academics.

Roddy

RSS Feeds: Managing the Mechanism

Roddy MacLeod — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:25:55 +0000

RSS Feeds: Managing the Mechanism is an interesting article in the most recent issue of FUMSI.

Roddy

APML

Roddy MacLeod — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:54:39 +0000

There’s a meeting of the JISC EMERGE Project Phase II (of which Gold Dust is a part) in York on 24-25 January, which some of us will attend. More information about Emerge is available.

As part of the pre-conference activities, attendees were asked to spruce their Emerge profiles up, etc, so I thought I’d write a brief post about Gold Dust on my Emerge blog.

One response to this post from George Roberts mentioned Attention Profiling – http://www.apml.org/ which sounds of interest WRT Gold Dust PIPs: “APML allows you to share your own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of your ranked interests”.

Roddy