There is a movement afoot to encourage and support "serious" blogging in science. Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting [BPR3] is a group of scientists who have made a step in this direction by releasing a set of icons that scientists are invited to include in their blog posts when "they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research."

BPR3 is an initial effort to encourage scientists to identify their commentary on peer-reviewed research articles -- whether the article is online or in print -- with an icon. The next step, according to BPR3's web site, is "to use bpr3.org to aggregate all the posts discussing peer-reviewed research from across the disciplines." If this effort succeeds it could well open up new doors to scholarly debate and discussion.

Why does this matter? Well, as was first brought to my attention at the ASIS&T panel discussion on Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication, there is a great deal of communication, debate, and discussion of scientific research within the blogosphere. However, unlike letters to the editor in peer-reviewed journals, there is no standard method to capture, collect, or forum for evaluating the opinions of blogging scientists. To the extent that research -- and discussion of research -- moves into the public sphere, there is a great opportunity for the scientific community to add to and discuss research as it happens.

I'm working on an article about blog readership via RSS and would like your help. If you have a few minutes, please fill out this three-question brief survey. Thanks!

Thanks to the 137 of you who have taken the quick subscriber survey that I posted on November 8. Based on my best-guess estimate of my readership on this date, I had 1513 feed subscribers on November 7, the day before I launched the poll. This represents a respectable 9% response rate.

I asked three questions in the survey:

1. Do you subscribe to the RSS4Lib RSS feed?
2. What tool were you using when you saw the post about this survey?
3. Where did you first see the link to this survey?

Of people who took the survey in the first two weeks (7:15 AM EST November 8 - 7:15 AM EST November 22), 96.2% (127 of 132) respondents were subscribers. Interestingly, though not necessarily significant, two of the non-subscribers ho took the survey in week 1; the other three did so in the week 2. Part way through week 3, all five of the additional surveys submitted have been by subscribers.

Of the five non-subscribers who took the survey in the first two weeks, three were at RSS4Lib when they saw the survey and two saw it linked in another blog.

Web-based aggregators are the clear favorite among respondents. Bloglines has a 43.9% share of the first two weeks' respondents (including eight users of Bloglines Beta). Next is Google Reader, with 42 users (31.8%). The numbers then dwindle dramatically, with five people reporting they use Sage Firefox extension and three or fewer using a variety of other tools.

Finally, I asked respondents where they saw the link to the survey. An overwhelming number of respondents (115, 87.1%) saw the survey link in RSS4Lib's RSS feed. Of the remaining 17 respondents, five noticed it on the RSS4Lib site, five at unspecified "other" or "don't know," and four others in various other blogs. From reviewing the referer logs and respondent comments, I note that two of the four came from the University of Michigan library's "superfeed of library and librarian blogs and two others came from blogrolls at other sites.

I also captured the user agent (the way the web browser or application identifies itself to the web server). Firefox is the browser of choice for two thirds (88 of 132) respondents, followed at 30.3% (40 of 132 respondents) by a mix of tools that don't identify themselves, followed finally by Safari (2 respondents), Internet Explorer (1), and Vienna (1). Mac users, by the way, account for 17.3% of respondents whose user agent identified itself, with Windows users making up the remaining 82.7% (only two user agent's identified themselves as being Vista).

I've been interested to see the 'long tail' of survey respondents. More than half -- 58.3% -- of respondents took the survey on the day I posted it (November 8). Responses have dwindled to fewer than 10 on all days after that, but even now, more than two weeks after its appearance, one or two subscribers are still taking it a day.

How to best encode characters with diacritics in your RSS feed? That was the question posed in a thread on Web4Lib recently, started by a librarian working putting his new books list into an RSS feed. (A great idea in itself, of course.) Since many books, especially in an academic library, but also in other libraries with user communities speaking diverse languages, this is important -- you want to be able to show the title properly, especially to speakers of the language for whom you've bought the book.

There are, of course, several ways to encode many diacritic marks (HTML character entities and Unicode, for example); finding the best one for RSS engendered some discussion.

The consensus in the discussion was that using character references is the best solution, particularly for the item title, which is arguably the most important part of an RSS item to get right (OK, the URL is also critical). If users cannot understand the title, why would they click to the full text?

Character references take the form

Ӓ