OATP mashups

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

This page has not yet been updated to reflect the transition from Connotea to TagTeam. It will be soon

• This is a section within the larger OA tracking project (OATP).

• If you create a customized feed, combining the project feed with other feeds, filtering it, or both, add it here. It might be useful to others.

• If you create widgets to display the feed, or other mashups of any kind to make the feed useful for different purposes, add them here.

• Related lists in OAD: Versions of the OATP project feed.

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Filtered versions of the project feed

• Removing duplicates. The Connotea feeds include duplicates. If two or more users tag the same item with the same tag (such as oa.new), then that item will appear in the project feed two or more times. Use Yahoo Pipes to create a new feed which filters out the duplicates.
  • No-dup RSS feed of the 100 most recent items. This is a feed of the 100 most recent items, without duplicates. For this purpose, "duplicate" items are those with the same URL, regardless of how they are titled or described. Here's an email feed based on the filtered RSS feed.

• Removing taggers. The Connotea feeds include items tagged by anyone. If you plan to be a prolific tagger, you'll want to see a version of the project feed which includes all items except those you tagged yourself. Then you can see what others have noticed, without looking again at the items you've already noticed yourself. Use Yahoo Pipes to create a new feed which filters out your own contributions.
  • Feeds filtered this way will usually not be useful to others and needn't be listed here. But to show that it can be done, here's a feed of the 50 most recent items other than those tagged by Peter Suber.

• Removing subtopics. Use Yahoo Pipes to create a new feed which filters out items containing any given keyword or combination of keywords. Because tags appear in the feed as words or strings, you can also filter out items with any given tag or combination of tags. Start with the version of the project feed you want (e.g. with the 50 most recent items, rather than the most recent 10 or 100), and then apply any filters you like.
  • If you create a feed filtering out certain subtopics, list them here with short descriptions, in case others would find them useful.

Combining the project feed with others

• Lambert Heller combined the OATP project feed with the feed on the tag openaccess from some Delicious users and the feed on openaccess at BibSonomy. He also used Grazr to create widget to display the combined feed on a blog or other web page.

• Jim Till combined the OATP project feed (first 15 items, no duplicates) with the feed (first 15 items) for a Twitter search for the hashtag #OpenAccess. The results are available as a webpage or as a RSS feed, sorted by publication date in descending order. This mashup doesn't eliminate duplicates that have been both bookmarked oa.new on Connotea and also hashmarked #OpenAccess (or #openaccess) on Twitter. For a brief report about this Yahoo pipe, see the Comment section of a blog post dated May 24, 2009.

Enhancing the feed with user engagement

• This version of the feed shows levels of user engagement, as this concept is defined by PostRank. You may either view all the posts in the feed with their engagement levels showing, or filter the feed and view only the posts at certain levels of engagement. This is an experiment. User engagement as measured by PostRank may not help identify the most important OA developments in the OATP feed. But if it does, it's one way to manage the high-volume OATP feed without filtering out entire subtopics or skimming.

Widgets to display the feed

• Connotea offers code and instructions for displaying the 10 most recently tagged items on a blog or web page. By default, however, its code will display just the items you tagged yourself. In order to display the 10 items most recently tagged with oa.new by any project participant, modify the Connotea instructions in one respect.
  • Replace the second script command, <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.connotea.org/pub/jsw/user/username">
  • with this, <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.connotea.org/pub/jsw/tag/oa.new">
  • For a working example of this widget, see the sidebar of Open Access News. The OAN version added minor color and font modifications to suit the blog's look and feel.

• Many other online services offer widgets for displaying RSS feeds on web pages. Eventually list some of the better ones here, preferably with links to working examples displaying the OATP feed.

Other ways to display the feed

• Technically, the email versions of the feed are mashups, picking up the Connotea RSS feeds and running them through the Feedburner RSS-to-email converter. But we list them with the versions of the project feed for users who are not comfortable with RSS and may not think to look elsewhere for variations.