Link post. Friendfeed for early June.

I often use threads that I see on Friendfeed as a source for my posts. I tried once to cross-post conversations I mark there to Twitter but Peta bought it to my attention that, as I was locked there, she couldn’t follow the links. Automating cross posting can be fraught.  I have an RSS feed from my discussions in FF to my GReader. The feed seems to break from time to time and a conversation that I thought was a DM appeared there. So I thought I would try a sort of edited summary link post to bring to your attention conversations of recent interest there. It’s way more time consuming but less dangerous. Unfortunately I haven’t yet found a way to embed these conversations on a WordPress.com blog (no iframe embed allowed) but I have tested these links and you should be able to follow them without joining up.

As with all social networks the value lies in the people that you follow. On Friendfeed I have managed to find a community of librarian and scientists both interested in scholarly communication and both contributing to a joint conversation. The links here are to the threads not the source posts as it’s the conversations that are of interest  and often contain links themselves. Unfortunately the titles do not necessarily give an indication of the turn that conversations can take.

So conversations that you may find of interest from the last couple of weeks:

• Peer review provides £209,976,000 public subsidy to commercial publishers
• Useful use of wordle to help folks decide which presentations they want to see
• Create your own Google Scholar RSS feed
• Web of Science Campus Letter | Robertson Library
• Abundance Obsoletes Peer Review, so Drop It
• Boycotting Nature?
• The mefites discuss reports from the front on the war between UC and Nature
• Why not submit your scientific poster or presentation to a public repository?
• @rdmpage: My God is the science publishing system broken. Why can’t I just submit a list of DOIs cited, rather than fuss with bibliographic formats?
• Stunningly high proposed price hike by Nature Publishing 4 Univ o California, may boycott

There were others that originated from locked accounts that I can’t link to. If I had more time I should find a way to format these better to attribute the post authors and post commentary about why they were interesting to me. Let me know if you find this useful and I may make this a regular thing and solve those issues. Mind you this was a particularly interesting couple of weeks in the scholarly publishing/library space.

And one last one not on scholarly publishing but that I liked – please follow the link- the last comment I found relevant.

• The failure mode of clever is “asshole.” – John Scalzi

And I know I owe you all another post for yesterday. Mea culpa.

Ping.fm – not so great for conversation

I have been a Twitter addict for about 14 months now and have been playing (lemming like) with other microblogging tools as they have come along been bought to my attention via Twitter.

Plurk was launched recently a few of my Twitter friends went over there so I went too- just to have a look at the shiny new toy.

The trouble was that not everyone did. While Twitter has had problems recently no-one quite wants to abandon it completely. These social network sites are all about the community. If your friends are not there they do not have much value. So the issue becomes how to keep up with those on Plurk and Twitter at the same time.

Plurk is great for conversations but at the moment it has no integration with other sites as Twitter does. It is not yet supported by Friendfeed and I couldn’t get Feeddemon to see the RSS feed – but that could be because I have a private feed.

Ping.fm is designed for those, like me, wanting sometimes to update their status on several sites at once eg Plurk, Twitter, Facebook. It offered a iGoogle gadget from their site so I added it to my iGoogle page and had a very convenient place to post status updates. I shut down Twitter etc when I don’t want distractions but I always have my homepage open.

Trouble happens when someone responds to the status change i.e. wants to start a conversation. Great but if you havent got the site open in your browser or desktop client (like Twirl) you will miss the response and the opportunity to connect. If you had those sites open you wouldn’t need Ping.fm in the first place. It all depends on how and why you are using these types of sites whether you will find Ping.fm useful.