Daily News Alerts Selected by <i>AIDS Treatment News</i>: www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew

Daily News Alerts Selected by AIDS Treatment News: www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew

by John S. James, December 18, 2006

Summary: Now you can follow treatment news as it happens at AIDSNEW, a free service of AIDS Treatment News. We select quality reports in medical journals, AIDS treatment sites, and the general press, and publish Web links to them at www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew -- all in one place, often on the first day the news is available anywhere. No need to subscribe, register, or log in. Just visit www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew, scroll down, and click any of the titles for more information. You can use almost any computer and Web browser.

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AIDS Treatment News now provides a service where you can read key treatment and related news as it happens, all in one place. We select from medical journals, AIDS treatment Web sites, online newspapers, and many other Web pages that come to our attention -- so that you can check important treatment news quickly, at your convenience. This service, called AIDSNEW, is free for everybody, with no subscription, registration or signup required. It should work with almost any computer and software that can browse the Web.

To try it, visit www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew
Scroll down, and in the center column you will find Web links to the stories we selected, beginning with the ones we added most recently. Each has a title; many but not all have a brief comment or quote added by AIDS Treatment News (in grey text). If you want more information, click the title to get a free abstract (and full text of the document as well, if it is free online). The information is usually authoritative because it comes from the original source, a peer-reviewed journal or other publication we believe to be reliable.

AIDS Treatment News selects an average of several news alerts per day. And we go to some trouble to provide a smooth user experience -- finding quality news that is free to nonsubscribers of the journal or newspaper (or at least has a meaningful free abstract). A few of the Web pages we link to do require free registration -- but more than 90% do not. Some of the headlines and articles are more technical than AIDS Treatment News, because they were written mainly for doctors. Just skip them if necessary.

You can keep up with major HIV/AIDS treatment-related news by spending about ten minutes a week to scan the headlines, plus the time to read any of these reports in depth. Local or national communities can be informed rapidly by this service and others like it -- and have the same information in common, so they can act immediately if needed. Also, key research will better reach those who want to know, and not be overlooked and lost in the flood of routine information.

Look and Feel

We are providing this service using software called Connotea (pronounced Conn-o-te'a), created and made available free by Nature Publishing Group (which publishes Nature, Nature Medicine, and over five dozen other scientific journals). This software also lets you search annotated Web links (called "bookmarks" in Connotea) contributed publicly by hundreds of scientists and doctors. The page at www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew may look busy; but if you only want to follow our news service you can ignore everything except our alerts, in the center column starting near the bottom of the screen. We cannot change the format of the page.

We could have changed the inconsistent capitalization of titles, but instead chose to leave the capitalization style that was used in the original articles.

Notes for Organizations:

1. This kind of news distribution can sometimes publish page-one stories even before the Web sites of major TV networks or other news organizations. For example, the recent report on adult male circumcision was released by NIAID (a branch of the U.S. National Institutes of Health), apparently to everyone simultaneously; our copy was sent at 19 seconds after noon on December 13. We checked email about 15 minutes later, and needed about five minutes to see that this was a major story, find NIAID's press release on its Web site, and click to publish the link. Corporate media usually does its own writing in order to have rights to its reports, even though the government press release itself was the definitive information at the time.

2. Despite its speed, this publication system includes human judgment, with every alert personally selected for the specific audience.

3. AIDS Treatment News spent no money at all on this project ($0.00) -- and little time beyond keeping up with the news, which we need to do anyway. Others could easily publish a similar service based on their own expertise -- likely providing the best (or the only) news feed anywhere in their areas of interest. AIDS-related topics might include access issues, prevention, U.S. or U.N agencies, political action alerts, fundraising, immunology, pathogenesis, drug effects and choices, or dozens of other focus areas.

4. If you want us to consider using your news release in the AIDSNEW alert service, you must publish it on the Web, not just send it in email (this is for technical reasons, not policy). You could easily publish your news on a blog, and then send an email announcement telling people where it is. Remember that our readers will not see your email, only the information you put on the Web.

For More Information:

1. Try our news-alert service at
www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew

2. For technical details, including which journals we follow most closely, or using RSS, see "AIDSNEW Treatment Alerts: Appendix" in this issue.

3. To learn more about Connotea see "AIDS Information Overload: What You Can Do Now," in AIDS Treatment News #419. Or in Connotea, see the 'Beginner's guide" links on the bottom of every page.

You have our permission to send this announcement to others who may be interested. You may want to use the latest copy -- or just send the the Web address, www.aidsnews.org/alerts/.

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