I have used the Alan Cho article to look at the Mashups he refers to, as I had no success in finding others on the web, although I found a few articles on the topic.
I looked at Biowizard again, I had set up my profile and searched on Pubmed before, but this time I wanted to alert others to what I found. I "promoted" two articles that had not already been selected, having searched Pubmed for "Mashups" & "Library 2.0". I wanted to alert other 3Cs course participants to what I'd found but could not find out how to Add a Friend. I could email someone, but this facility is available on Pubmed any way. I even tried searching the Help feature, but this did not give me the information I needed.
I then resorted to asking Sue if she knew how to Add a friend, she logged onto Biowizard but came up with my profile! I tried logging onto Biowizard again and this time it came up with Sue's profile! So I gave up.
Biowizard feels like a very unstable platform to me, but perhaps this is symptomatic of some of the new technologies that are being developed. My original thought was that Biowizard could be used as a virtual journal club, but on closer investigation I think that better full-text availability would be needed to make this a worthwhile tool. I am not sure what value there is in voting for articles if voters have not accessed & read the whole paper. Although I've come across many library users who have just used the abstract of an article in their references & haven't bothered to read the whole thing.
My suggested activity is for others to try and Add a Friend on Biowizard, perhaps you could then me what I need to do.
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4 comments:
Hi,
I work for BioWizard and came across your post through Google Alerts. Thank you for using the site and most importantly thank you for the honest feedback.
I wanted to address two things. For starters, I notice that you conducted searches for "Mashups" & "Library 2.0" using our PubMed feature. This feature is most helpful when conducting searches on Life Science or Biomedical-related topics as it queries the US National Library of Medicine. Common search terms on BioWizard involve clinical and life science terminonology whereas your terms appear to be relevant for a Web Design site.
Secondly, your feedback regarding the "add a friend" feature for BioWizard is well supported and certainly appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to blog about this issue. We are continually working to improve our social networking features and hold your comments in high regard. Currently the "add a friend" feature has several qualifying events involved. For example, you must be logged in to add someone, and that someone has to be a registered user who has posted an abstract. So long as these qualifications are met, you can then click on their name in the "posted by" section of the abstract, which will load three new options:
1) View profile
2) Add to my friends
3) Block user
BioWizard's mission is to Make Research Simple. The thought behind our current layout was that if you liked a posted abstract, you would add the poster to your friends given these shared research interests. We look forward to improving our social networking aspects to support more sophisticated communication amongst "friends" but until this is accomplished, messaging between contacts is disabled. In the meantime, I hope that you've found our conference abstracts, PubMed Search with email functionality, export to EndNote, and Scopus Citations features to be of value.
Best Regards,
Lauren M. Possiel
Online Marketing Manager
BioWizard.com
Dear Gwen
I set up an account and added sue as my friend when she mentioned this resource in her blog for assignment 5.
Anyway you look up an article and then click on the username of the person who posted it this will then display next to it 3 options the 2nd one is 'add to my friends'. I hope that you are sucessful with this.
Sandra
Hi Gwen
You asked about how to add a friend in Biowizard. I did this in response to sue's mention of her recommending a paper on there in assignment 5.
You look up a paper. Then you click on the username of the person who posted the article. This then displays 3 more links. The 2nd link is add a friend. I hope that you manahe to do this.
Sandra
Hi Gwen,
http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups/directory is a directory of over 2500 mashups which you might find interesting. It has all sorts of things, from "Boots optician store locator (UK)", to "Cost of living worldwide".
Lesley H
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