Webfeeds: University of Chicago Press Journals

Jay Bhatt at Drexel mentioned University of Chicago Press in his list of journals offering feeds. Another multi-disciplinary publisher with some important science titles like Astrophysical Journal, Astronomical Journal and Quarterly Review of Biology.

UC Press has done everything right on this one. There's a link off the homepage to a single list of all of the journal feeds, and the feeds are also accessible from the journal homepages.

They also have a new books feed.

Webfeeds: American Institute of Physics

AIP now has RSS feeds for their 11 journals. For the longest time, they just had the 3 news feeds: Physics Today, Physics News Update and FYI: Science Policy News. Now they've caught up with IOP and APS.

There's currently no master list, so you'll have to go to each journal homepage. What's interesting here is that there's not only the one feed for all of the articles, but there are also "topic" feeds that correspond with the sections of the journal. For example, if you're interested in Applied Physics Letters but just the articles in the Applied Biophysics section, you can get the feed to keep track of those articles only.

#Feeds for each journal, not including "All Topics," "Communications/Letters to the Editor," "Comments and Errata," etc.
• Applied Physics Letters - 10
• Chaos - 7
• Geochemical Transactions - one feed only
• Journal of Applied Physics - 11
• Journal of Chemical Physics - 5
• Journal of Mathematical Physics - 8
• Journal of Physical & Chemical Reference Data - one feed only
• Low Temperature Physics - one feed only
• Physics of Fluids - 10
• Physics of Plasmas - 8
• Review of Scientific Instruments - 12

Webfeeds: Royal Society of Chemistry

Finally!! The RSC now has RSS feeds for their journals, with more on the way.

Feeds are currently available for journal Advance Articles and further feeds are planned that will cover other RSC news and activities.

Kudos to Phil Abrahams and everyone else at RSC for moving forward with this. The feeds are listed on this single page as well as on each journal homepage. There's nothing yet on the RSC homepage (hint), but there is a "latest news" link on the journals homepage.

Webfeeds: CSIRO Publishing

Australia's CSIRO Publishing now has feeds for all of their science journals: including Australian Journal of Chemistry, Environmental Chemistry, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, Marine & Freshwater Research, and Australian Journal of Zoology.

Plus a new books/CD's feed and another for their sustainable development magazine Ecos.

Google Talk

The Google empire continues to spread. There are articles in today's Guardian and NYT about Google Talk, the newly launched VoIP/IM beta. It's limited to Gmail account holders, so I've added a few people to my list to try it out (if you want to add me, it's tmvogel@gmail.com). It looks like you can configure GAIM, Trillian Pro and other third party IM managers to accept the Google Talk information (but not sadly, not the free Trillian). Is it worth upgrading to Trillian Pro? I went ahead and upgraded to Trillian Pro and configured it for Google Talk using the Jabber plugin.

I'm curious to see how it compares to Skype, which has been a joy to use while working on the CMS article with 2 of my friends and former colleagues at Georgia State. It's worked well in my office, outside the library on my laptop, even at home using the dialup.

Webfeeds: Cambridge Journals Online

Cambridge Journals Online, as promised, is now offering feeds (RSS/Atom) for their journals. The feed links are on each journal homepage, as well as listed together on a single page. I didn't see anything on the site that give an explanation of how to use the feeds--or the difference between the RSS and Atom options--but I'm hoping this is in progress. The feed links are not embedded in the RSS and Atom buttons. Instead, they take you to the explanatory page. The two pages are virtually identical, going so far as to include RSS and Atom are just two different formats that do basically the same thing on each, with the feed link at the bottom of the page (RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3).

This is a vast improvement of that other multidisciplinary publisher (OUP) that still doesn't have all their feeds listed on a single page.

Webfeeds: Cambridge Journals Online

They don't have them available yet, but RSS/Atom feeds are listed as one of the new features available when the CJO site goes live on August 8.

Science News Podcasts

Here are a few good sites that offer science news podcasts. If there are other you'd like to recommend, please do so.

Science AT NASA
Science and Society
Science Friday (NPR) - they also have a good explanation of how to use the files
SETI Podcast
Quirks and Quarks (CBC Radio)

NewsGator and FeedStation (podcasts)

Now that I'm spending some more time with NewsGator (to see if it does a better job than Bloglines with the bold/unread indicator with database search feeds), I've also downloaded the FeedStation beta.

I have subscribed to several podcast feeds. When I open up the feed in NewsGator, I get the option to add each audio file to a My Podcasts folder, which I guess is synched to a FeedStation folder on my C: drive. The selected files get downloaded to my C: drive, and then I can listen to the files when I want in Media Player (or I suppose I could export them to my iPod if I had one).

Bloglines: Bold/Undread feature not working w/ database feeds?

Lately, I've been having problems with my database search feeds in Bloglines not going bold when there's new content. This includes my feeds with ProQuest, PubMed, HubMed and EiV2 (though not Astro Data System)--and it happens with some feeds, not all of them. There are new records, but the feeds aren't showing up in bold. Has anyone else been seeing this?

It's frustruating because I'm showing patrons how to use the feeds offered by these database providers, and while I'm explaining how the reader works I have to give the proviso that the bold/unread feature may not work with these feeds.

I've sent a e-mail to the Bloglines help desk, and we'll see how successful that goes. I'm not sure if it's Bloglines, the databases, or my computer/browser (I've tried 2 computers in IE and Firefox). I've copied the OPML file into Newsgator's Web Edition, and I'll see how the database search feeds show up in this reader.