Month: February 2009

Research Blogging — Connecting the Blogosphere to “The Literature” a Link at a Time

The Research Blogging web site is a nexus for peer-reviewed literature and serious academic blogging about it. (No, that’s not a contradiction in terms.) Research Blogging helps readers find critical analysis of scientific reporting by pulling these scholarly blog posts together. Many of these blog posts in reaction to published articles are written by experts in the field and can help you put the article in context. From the Research Blogging site:

Do you like to read about new developments in science and other fields? Are you tired of “science by press release”? ResearchBlogging.org is your place. Research Blogging allows readers to easily find blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases.

While the majority of posts indexed by Research Blogging are in the hard sciences, there are a reasonable number in the area of information and library science, broadly construed.
To join the commentary, you must register. Once you’ve done that, you get a code snippet to include in your posts that are about peer-reviewed articles. Research Blogging then adds your post to its index. Being a scholarly effort, there is peer review of posts indexed by the site — if other registered research bloggers feel your post does not follow the site’s guidelines, it is removed from the index. This keeps the content relevant to the site’s mission.

Yahoo Pulls Plug on RSS Advertising Tool

Yahoo! has announced it will no longer provide advertisements in RSS feeds. Like other wholesalers of online advertising, Yahoo! offered feed creators the chance to put advertisements in their RSS feeds so that they would appear at the end of an item in the feed. Yahoo!’s solution — unlike, for example, Google’s — did not requre that the feed publisher offer subscriptions through a Yahoo!-controlled server. You kept your RSS feed where it was and used some HTML in the feed template to insert the advertisement. (Google, after purchasing FeedBurner, has content creators redirect their feeds through its servers.)
I’m not necessarily upset that a source of ads in feeds is going away. Yahoo! may not be doing well and may be focusing on its serious revenue sources. It’s been reported that other long-standing Yahoo! tools (Briefcase, for example) are also going away. Then again, Yahoo!’s retreat from this market might be indicative of how the perceived value of RSS feeds is changing. If there’s not sufficient revenue from RSS-based advertising to keep a major, though second-tier, player in the game, what does that mean for publishing via RSS?