AIDS news feeds: the future.A great challenge today is to help people find the key information they want and need, in the tsunami of new material that keeps coming out. Search engines cannot replace human judgment for alerting people to opportunities they did not know about at all, and therefore did not search for. And the same news feeds for specialists could help research as well. Large AIDS conferences have thousands of abstracts presented in a few days; almost no one reads and understands all of them. Leaders and core groups focus on a few--so crucial but unusual discoveries may not get attention. A number of specialists scanning scanning /scan·ning/ (skan´ing) 1. the act of examining by passing over an area or organ with a sensing device. 2. scanning speech. the conference presentations will catch some of these and alert an interested community immediately. There ate already AIDS news feeds, for example Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Report, http://www.kaisernetwork.org/Daily_reports/rep_hiv.cfm--but we need many more, and the Kaiser service is labor intensive Labor Intensive A process or industry that requires large amounts of human effort to produce goods. Notes: A good example is the hospitality industry (hotels, restaurants, etc), they are considered to be very people-oriented. See also: Capital Intensive, Trading Dollars and probably expensive to maintain. An easier system would allow different experts to develop a great variety of possible news feeds--such as vaccines, AIDS-related cancers, treatment news for resource-limited settings, of basic-science issues. Anyone, anywhere can set up a news feed like ours, completely free if they already have online access. For science and medicine we suggest using http://www.connotea.org See .org. (networking) org - The top-level domain for organisations or individuals that don't fit any other top-level domain (national, com, edu, or gov). Though many have .org domains, it was never intended to be limited to non-profit organisations. RFC 1591. (which is specialized spe·cial·ize v. spe·cial·ized, spe·cial·iz·ing, spe·cial·iz·es v.intr. 1. To pursue a special activity, occupation, or field of study. 2. for these fields)--and for other subjects, we suggest http://del.icio.us (which is simpler; I used it to collect links for www.peacephilly.org). You can include almost any news story of other public Web site on the list that you create. (Alternatively you could use a blog--but the "social bookmarking Ranking a Web site by users who like the content rather than by the total number of links to the site. Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) let users tag their favorite sites with key words and post them for others to see. See folksonomy and page ranking. " services like Connotea and del.icio.us See social bookmarking. ate easier because it takes only seconds to add a new Web page to your list, helping to keep it up to date.) You can easily provide an important news service worldwide, in any specialized field where you have an interest and background, and need to keep up with new developments anyway. For AIDS information, we think the next step will be news feeds by small groups, maybe two to ten people or more--of highly specialized feeds by individuals. Meanwhile see our experiment at http://www.aidsnews.org/now. |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion