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AIDSNEW Treatment Alerts: Appendix
Summary: Here are details on our AIDSNEW service that many users will not need to know. Read the introduction first at www.aidsnews.org/alerts/.
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What Medical Journals and Other Sites Do We Cover?
We focus on research reports in medical journals including:
(Public Library of Science)
We include articles published on AIDS sites, for example:
We also include other AIDS sites, and some online newspaper articles if they do not require registration.
Receiving Our Alerts in RSS
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to our alert service in the usual way.
Unless you are already using RSS, it provides little advantage in using the AIDSNEW alert service. RSS is good for following many different blogs or other news sources simultaneously. If you are using only a few news sources, RSS is unnecessary.
Searching, AIDSNEW, and Connotea
You do not need to do any searching on AIDSNEW, since its main purpose is to supply recent news you may never have heard of (and therefore cannot search for) -- not to provide an archival database of news. But you can use Connotea to search for bookmarks (Web links) contributed by many scientists and doctors, not just us. For example, AIDS Treatment News added fewer than 300 bookmarks (Web links to news) to AIDSNEW, before announcing this service -- while a search for HIV found over 4,000 bookmarks on Connotea.
To search, use the bar near the top of the Connotea page. Set the search to "All", enter "HIV" (quotation marks and capitalization not necessary), and click "Find results". Or use multiple words to find bookmarks that include all of them; for example, "HIV tuberculosis" currently finds 66 bookmarks. You can click on any of the "tags" (user-chosen categories) to find other bookmarks on that subject.
How Our AIDSNEW Alert Service Differs from Other News Sources
Google News, etc.: Google News (http://news.google.com) is very good if you know what you are looking for, and have at least one key word to help distinguish it from the more than 2,000,000 other news stories (from 4,500 different sources) on Google News at any one time. You can follow some AIDS developments there by searching for 'HIV' (we do so, for leads). But our AIDSNEW alert service offers our judgment of what is important for our readership -- not just a list of recent stories that contain the word 'HIV'.
Blogs: Our AIDSNEW service provides selected Web links, much like a blog, but is easier to publish. Connotea knows how to handle the messy Web addresses used at many sites. Publishers' commentary is clearly optional. Basically you only need to click to immediately publish the Web page that you are visiting (Connotea requires a little extra work, but this could go away in the future). Therefore an organization can keep its news alerts up to date, more easily than with a blog.
Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report: This useful news-alert service from the Kaiser Family Foundation (http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hiv.cfm) offers human judgment and selection, like our alerts; it also lets you scan major AIDS news in a few minutes a week. The main difference is that with AIDSNEW we can provide a specialized news feed at a tiny fraction of the resources Kaiser must spend to do theirs. Therefore hundreds of organizations and individuals could use Connotea or similar services (such as Del.icio.us) to publish news alerts in their own areas of expertise -- giving readers a wide choice of which specialties, experts, or teams they want to follow.
Amedeo: This free service emails a weekly alert of links to journal articles, for HIV/AIDS or any of dozens of other medical specialties (visit http://www.amedeo.com/medicine/hiv.htm to sign up). Readers can customize the default list of journals for their specialty. But Amedeo only looks at journals -- and only offers a choice of about 50 of them for all the medical specialties together (and not including PLOS Medicine, for example, as of December 2006). In contrast, AIDSNEW can include any journal abstracts, or almost anything else publicly available on the Web. And we select our alerts for a defined audience (in this case, readers of AIDS Treatment News), while Amedeo seems to be for AIDS doctors and scientists in general.
AIDS Treatment News: Since we can click to publish alerts on AIDSNEW instead of writing the stories ourselves, we can publish more than 10 times as many alerts -- and get them online many times faster than the newsletter.
The "Wisdom of Crowds"
A big focus in online services today is databases that combine information from many people, and therefore can become better as they are used, often through a voting system of some kind. A classic example is the Google search engine, which returns the most-linked-to Web pages first (instead of returning thousands of pages in no particular order, as early search engines sometimes did). And news sites like Digg let readers vote on stories, automatically promoting more popular ones to more prominence on the site.
We do not know of any good wisdom-of-crowd sites in AIDS at this time -- suggesting a project for someone to take on. (Digg currently has very little news on HIV. It would be easy to put news there -- but harder to build a constituency.)
The emphasis on wisdom-of-crowds popularity in the online world should not obscure the additional need for experts educating crowds. People make poor choices if they do not know the real options available. Expertise alone with no reference to popular appeal can lead to boring or incomprehensible information (sometimes the academic standard). But popularity without expertise can lead to shallowness, with endless stories promoted mainly for their star or freak-show qualities, or for unseen agendas (for examples, see TV news). We need the wisdom of both experts and crowds.
In the future, software could help people select their own experts within different news feeds. Readers might set up their own profiles including hundreds of experts, few of whom they know -- creating unique, complex personal views to alert them to what is new in the world and important to them.
Notes
1. We go to considerable trouble to spare our readers from silly and burdensome registration requirements on the sites we bookmark -- or offensive advertisements such as those that deliberately cover up the text you are reading. When we do include a Web page that requires free registration, we say so. And we do not bookmark articles that have no free abstract, and require non-subscribers to pay an exorbitant fee up to $40 or more to read any part of the article; this does mean that some news we would otherwise cover is not included here. Another problem is that journals sometimes publish research online first (which is good), but then abandon that Web address for a different addressing scheme when the print journal comes out. We watch for this glitch and re-enter the bookmark when it happens, but sometimes we miss one.
2. If there are issues about your right to distribute certain material, you might want to avoid putting it on the Web, where copyright owners can easily search for unauthorized copies. Be aware that some email lists post their messages to the Web automatically. It is better to avoid problems by writing your own short message, action alert, or press release -- and give your readers authoritative background by linking to free news stories (found through Google News, for example -- or through our AIDSNEW service). But even though those stories are free, that does not create any right to copy their text, etc. into your Web site or blog. Link to the information, instead of copying it.
3. Let us know if you see a recent article that we should cover, but missed. And tell us if a bookmark doesn't work for any reason. See below for how to email us about this project.
4. This AIDSNEW service does not send email alerts. Instead, you can get delivery by RSS (which does not have the spam problem of email). Probably most people will use this service by visiting the Web page from time to time to check the new headlines.
5. We can share what we have learned to help others set up services like AIDSNEW, www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew". If you are interested, contact this writer at aidsnews@aidsnews.org (and preferably include "alerts" is the subject line, to bypass spam control).
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Copyright 2006 by John S. James. We prefer that you link to www.aidsnews.org or a specific article -- no permission required. Otherwise permission is granted for nonprofit use. Please check with us (aidsnews@aidsnews.org) before copying articles more than a year old.