Fast Treatment Alerts from AIDS Treatment News: www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew
Summary: AIDS Treatment News announces a free bookmarking site where you can follow current treatment developments as they occur, all in one place.
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You can check medical-research, treatment, and related news from many different journals and Web sites, all in one place at www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew -- sometimes on the first day of public release. In about ten minutes a week you can scan important AIDS treatment developments as they occur -- news that mainstream media may have covered poorly or not at all. And you can click for in-depth information if you want it.
An ideal way to use our alert service is to scan the top 10 or more "bookmarks" to news reports once or twice a week. The ones on top of the list are those we added most recently. The brief comments in grey text are by John S. James of AIDS Treatment News, unless otherwise indicated (quotation marks indicate a quote from the bookmarked Web page itself). We select these reports for the readership of our newsletter -- but can include over 10 times more bookmarks to stories written elsewhere than original stories written by AIDS Treatment News.
This news-alert service is completely free, and requires no subscription, sign-up or registration. Just visit www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew
Technical Notes
1. We focus on research reports in journals including AIDS, British Medical Journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases, HIV Medicine, JAMA, Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, Journal of Infectious Diseases, Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, and PLOS Medicine, and other relevant journals and conferences. We also include articles published on AIDS sites (including AIDSmeds.com, AIDSmap.com, HIV Treatment Bulletin (iBase) [http://www.i-base.org.uk/htb/], The Body [http://www.thebody.com] and The Body Pro, HIVandHepatitis.com, NATAP [http://www.natap.org], Clinical Care Options for HIV [http://www.ClinicalOptions.com/hiv], POZ [http://www.poz.com] TAG [http://www.aidsinfonyc.org/tag/] and others). Sometimes we include general newspaper articles, if our readers can reach them without having to register with the site. To test this system, we had already collected almost 200 AIDS-relevant bookmarks when this article went to press.
2. Other organizations could use the free Connotea service to collect similar news reports, action alerts, recommendations, or other information in any number of specialized fields. This kind of publishing can take very little time (much less than maintaining a blog), since busy experts can just click a Web page they are viewing anyway, to immediately bookmark that page publicly, for anyone in the world with Internet access.
3. The Web page you will see at www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew looks "busy" -- because we are using the free Connotea software developed mainly for sharing Web bookmarks among scientists and doctors, not for publishing an alert service, and AIDS Treatment News has little control over its look and feel. You can ignore everything on the page except the center column, which scrolls down; here you will find the bookmarks (Web links) added by AIDS Treatment News.
4. Readers who use RSS can subscribe to our alert service at www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew -- or can subscribe to a particular keyword search, to be alerted only when we add a bookmark found by that search.
5. We started this service in late 2006, and it has some temporary limitations. Many of the initial articles are a month or two old, but important enough that we included them anyway. Next year the backlog of older articles will be reduced, resulting in more current material in the top (most recently added) 10 to 20 bookmarks. Also, our use of "tags" (the keywords listed in the column on the left) is currently sketchy and incomplete. (Tags are not necessary anyway for the main purpose of this site, providing news alerts.)
6. You may want to search our 200+ bookmarks for words of interest (for example, resveratrol) -- whether or not these words are tags. Use the Connotea search bar at the top of the page; set the search to "This collection" to search our bookmarks, or to "All" to search the whole Connotea database. This search looks for any word in the titles, descriptions, and other fields in the Connotea database itself, but does not search the content of the bookmarked Web pages.
7. We go to considerable trouble to spare our readers from silly and burdensome registration requirements on the sites we bookmark -- or offensive advertisements such as those that deliberately cover up the text one is reading. When we do bookmark a Web page that requires free registration, we say so. And we almost never bookmark articles that have no free abstract, and require non-subscribers to pay an exorbitant fee up to $40 or more to read any part of just one article. This does mean that a few news reports we would like to cover are not included here. Another problem is that journals sometimes publish research online first (which is good), but then abandon that Web address for a different addressing scheme when the print journal comes out. We watch for this glitch and re-enter the bookmark when it happens, but sometimes we miss one, so if a bookmark doesn't work, let us know at aidsnews@aidsnews.org.
8. Anyone who has news they want published should realize that we cannot include it here unless it is publicly available on the Web (for technical not policy reasons). An emailed action alert alone is not enough. These days it is easy (and entirely free) to start a blog and put alerts, press releases, etc. on it, and then we and others can bookmark them. Do email people (including us, aidsnews@aidsnews.org) to let them know it's there; the search engines may not pick up your information quickly. Also, we cannot bookmark a PDF file even if it on the Web; but you can create a short page on a blog or other Web site with the link to download the file. (Note: anything on the Web can get more attention than most emails, including unwanted attention. If there are questions about your right to distribute the material, avoid putting it on the Web, where copyright owners often search for unauthorized copies. Be aware that some email lists post their messages on the Web automatically.)
9. There could be dozens of similar news-alert services in AIDS alone, specializing in topics like medical practice, access to care, basic science, the global epidemic, policy, ethics, activism, vaccines, microbicides, operations research, the Global Fund, AIDS at the United Nations, etc. Each will present experts' selection of the most important news anywhere on the Web; and readers can choose their experts, according to whom they trust and which topics they want to see. Each expert and each reader might spend just five to ten minutes a week (for readers to scan the news), and the result will be better informed publics, and less chance of important research getting lost in the flood of routine information.
Next Steps
If you find this AIDS treatment news-alert service useful, you could help by bringing it to the attention of others who should know about it. You have our permission to send copies of this article, or only the introductory section (not including "Technical Notes") if you prefer. Or just send the address, www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew
We can assist in setting up similar services, in AIDS or otherwise. If you are interested, contact this writer at aidsnews@aidsnews.org (and preferably include "newsalert" is the subject line, to bypass spam control).
[revised 2006-12-03]
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