A recent headline in Genome Technology online says, When it comes to blogging, comments are everything. GTO picked up on frustrations at adding comments on PLoS One. I won’t dwell on the technical difficulties. The Topaz platform is still in beta, and glitches are to be expected, although hopefully such core functionality will stabilize soon.
I am going to talk about the other killer feature of the Topaz … trackbacks. I have long maintained that while commenting has its place (not everyone is a blogger), trackbacks are the real killer feature of current publishing platforms and content management systems. By aggregating information around an article or post, users can go beyond PLoS One to have discussions on a particular issue, even casual commenters. I would love to see Pubmed add such a feature, or some third party to add a trackback aggregator as a greasemonkey script or something along those lines.
Of course there are those who think that the trackback is dead, but they IMO widgets, etc don’t quite maintain context in the same way, but in general, what I am arguing for is not trackbacks as we know them per sé, but a mechanism that allows you to see in real time (and without having to go elsewhere) about the universe of conversation around a particular paper.
Technorati Tags: PLoS One, Trackbacks
4 Comments
I agree with almost everything you say..except the part about PUBMED adding trackbacks. I really dont want PUBMED and the EBI to jump onto the web 2.0 bandwagon as far as things like trackbacks go. I dont think I want to see PUBMED cluttered with trackbacks from blogs etc..Maybe thats the job of a new startup like Pubmed2.0 or gopubmed.
In a way isnt a “articles that reference this article” a trackback. While Pubmed still does not provide this feature..I am big fan of the relatively new “related articles feature” . This is great for content discovery. You can read more about the related articles computation at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/computation.html
You are completely right. This is just an extension of “articles that reference this article”. Now if all publishers developed some discovery method (story for another post) like Topaz has implemented for their online content, then things would get a lot simpler.
You don’t even need to clutter up the page. It can just be a little link on the right corner “See all discussion on this paper” kind of thing. Nothing “web 2.0″ about it really
I agree with almost everything you say..except the part about PUBMED adding trackbacks. I really dont want PUBMED and the EBI to jump onto the web 2.0 bandwagon as far as things like trackbacks go. I dont think I want to see PUBMED cluttered with trackbacks from blogs etc..Maybe thats the job of a new startup like Pubmed2.0 or gopubmed.
In a way isnt a “articles that reference this article” a trackback. While Pubmed still does not provide this feature..I am big fan of the relatively new “related articles feature” . This is great for content discovery. You can read more about the related articles computation at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static...
You are completely right. This is just an extension of “articles that reference this article”. Now if all publishers developed some discovery method (story for another post) like Topaz has implemented for their online content, then things would get a lot simpler.
You don't even need to clutter up the page. It can just be a little link on the right corner “See all discussion on this paper” kind of thing. Nothing “web 2.0″ about it really
One Trackback
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