Feature of the Week: Document Previews

If you are regularly attaching PDF documents to your publication posts you have probably already seen it: since quite a while BibSonomy renders a preview image for each uploaded document. A large version is shown whenever you hover with the mouse over a link to the document. For one selected document of each post a small preview is also shown in in the post lists of your personal pages, as can be seen in the following screenshot of my publication posts:

The previews on the one hand help you to quickly identify papers where you remember the cover page but not their exact title and on the other hand give you a first glimpse at the document. If you upload the cover photos of books (you can get them, e.g., from WorldCat), you can quickly distinguish books from other types of publications, as their covers are often colorful and diverse from, e.g., journal articles. A click on the small preview image opens the corresponding document.
Originally, we implemented this feature upon request of a computer imaging group for which it was important to upload the images of their documents and quickly access previews of them in BibSonomy.


If you haven't uploaded a document for your post, yet, a default icon is shown in the post lists instead of the preview. A click on that icon ...

... immediately opens a file upload dialog where you can upload a document:

And that's it: you can now download the document whenever and wherever you want. The preview is not shown immediately since it needs some time until it is rendered. Typically, this should take no more than 15 minutes.

Happy uploading!

Feature of the week: Auto-completion when sending resources to friends

I'm sure you all know this - sometimes a particular web resource makes you think of a friend or colleague (let's call her Lisa) and you're thinking "Hey, that's definitely something Lisa MUST see!". In the academic field, a typical example are interesting research papers, or for your friends at home it's the latest XKCD comic. There's different ways to share links - according to this study, of course Facebook is a major player, but still sharing via Email has a noticeable share.

Bu in an ideal world (where everybody has BibSonomy account, of course ;-) ) it's even simpler: When you're posting a resource to BibSonomy, all you need is a tiny tag, and we'll do the rest for you. How does it work? I'm sure you all still know about Stephan's blog post about your BibSonomy inbox, which you can find in the top right corner when being logged in. Now if you want to put something let's say into Lisa's inbox, you simply add the tag

send:lisa

to the resource - just in the same manner as you add any other kind of tag. So far, so good - this works well when you exactly know Lisa's username (easy in this case, OK ;-) ). But in order to support you in sharing resources with your friends, we've implemented a tiny, but useful little helper: Once you start typing send: into the tag entry box, we're suggesting you a set of autocompletions, based on your friends list. In this way, all you need to remember is that Lisa's username starts with an "L" - once her real username pops up as an autocompletion option, you'll recognize it. Here's what it looks like:

Then, you can either click on the suggested tag, or press the TAB key, and you're done. Easy, isn't it? 

Have fun with this little helper, keep on sharing great resources via BibSonomy and first of all of course happy tagging,

  Dominik

Release 2.0.24

Today saw the release of BibSonomy 2.0.24. The release contained several smaller bug or layout fixes and internal cleanup. Apart from that, we included some infrastructure for features that we prepare for a later release. Among them are preview pictures for bookmarks and reference sections for reviews and comments.
We also tweaked the QR Code reader a little, which should now run faster.
Stay tuned for more news in the following feature of the week posts.

Happy Tagging
Stephan

Feature of the week: Linked discussions

Bonjour,

today I introduce you a fresh baked feature, the opportunity to add links to BibSonomy posts to your discussions. This is especially handy if you want to connect some of your post, like recommending a related paper.

How to do that? Easy question!

First of all, you have to go to the post you want to write a review about. For me, this is the book "Writing That Works". Then you click on the stars to start writing a discussion.

As you see, until now this publication had no review at all. That is really a pity. A good publication or web page deserves to get a good feedback, and the bad ones as well.

Okay, lets continue on our tutorial. You write your review as usual. To add a link, just use the Wikipedia syntax and frame your link with doubled square brackets.

As you see, there is no "http://" and stuff like that. We made it like this to prevent spammers from misusing this wonderful feature and append advertisements to your publications. Just use the part of the URI that begins after "http://www.bibsonomy.org/". In my case this is "url/2536259b61404196b5a7e1a95e5d17dc". A publication would have "bibtex/" instead of "url/" as prefix.

Basically, that's it. I hope you enjoy our new feature and keep in mind: Every post deserves a good feedback.

Happy discussing

Juergen

Feature of the week: Organize your publications with the help of QR Codes

Organizing your publications became easier with the help of BibSonomy. Now the workflow will even become more comfortable. We introduce a brand new experimental feature to help you putting together references with the help of QR Codes.

We implemented the possibility to automatically embed a QR Code containing the URL of the corresponding BibSonomy post into your uploaded documents which can be read and decoded by the new QR Code scanner inside the clipboard. Of course you can always choose to download your document with or without the QR Code.

After uploading a private copy of one of your collected publications you will recognize a new entry on the right side of the already familiar download link reading "including a QR Code":

The red box marks the link to click if you want BibSonomy to embed the QR Code into the copy of your document. The modified version is provided as a direct download - same as usual. 

The QR Code can be read by any QR Code reader. It contains the URL to the corresponding post. The new QR Code scanner on the clipboard page goes even further and immediately adds the corresponding post to your clipboard. Simply hold the QR code in front of your webcam such that the code appears in the designated area in the sidebar of the clipboard page.

After sucessfully decoding the QR-Code, you'll hear the "snap sound"  and the post that belongs to your publication will have been added to your clipboard.  

Workflow suggestion:

When writing a paper for your studies you search for related work and references. Create posts on BibSonomy to get a digital representation of your reference collection. Procede by printing these references with an embedded QR Code. Finally you can put together the papers you actually want to cite by scanning them with the QR Code scanner.

This gives you the opportunity to compile a sublist of your collection of publications in the blink of an eye without having to remember where the corresponding post is located.

We are currently working to make the feature even faster. Stay tuned for one of our next updates.

Happy Scanning

Philipp

PS: For the QR Code Scanner to work, you have to install the flash plugin on your system.

BibSonomy Release 2.0.23

BibSonomy now runs as version 2.0.23! This release contained a lot of clean-up with respect to the latest layout changes.

• The page is now completely scrollable again.
• Preview pictures of publications are only displayed on larger screens.
• The sidebar is no longer undisplayed on smaller screens to keep all navigation (tags, similar tags, discussion pages, etc.) available.

The non-scrollable version of BibSonomy might come back sometime as one of two or more options to choose from in your personal settings. Our efforts to redesign BibSonomy continue and we hope to see some results within the next months.

Next to these design-minded changes, the new release includes:

• An all new experimental feature: QR Codes for publications and a QR Code scanner on the clipboard.
• A first draft for referencing publications or bookmarks in discussions (reviews and comments (take a look).
• A first draft for posting publications by uploading a .pdf file.

Stay tuned for the next feature of the week posts to learn more about these new possibilities.

Happy tagging

Stephan

Discover Names

Today I'll introduce to you to one of our new projects at our research unit: The Nameling

The Nameling was developed in the need for finding a given name (which of course should be nice and enjoyable). It turned out that finding a nice name wasn't that difficult - but all names which we found pleasant, were also popular in our neighbourhood. Being busy at work with mining patterns in huge data sets, the idea for mining pleasant names was born.

Currently, the Nameling implements a similarity search for given names, based on co-occurrences in the English and German version of Wikipedia (as a hidden feature, you can also access similarities emerging from the French version). This allows you, for example, to browse for names which fit to a name you like. Whenever possible, we also extracted corresponding categories for names from Wikipedia, allowing you to browse through all names within a given category:

By clicking on the lovely butterfly, you can add names to your list of favourite names. You can also share your favourites with some of your friends, for collaboratively searching for your "best fit":

The Nameling gives you also access to further background information (at least a link to a corresponding Wikipedia article, if available). This comprises popularity rankings obtained from Wikipedia and Twitter, distribution of names over time as extracted from person data in Wikipedia and co-occurrences displayed as a graph whose nodes you can expand by a mouse click for navigating within the co-occurrence network.

Of course: We are a research unit and we want to go further. The Nameling currently implements a first and simple measure of similarity. We will make use of the Nameling's query logs to improve rankings and similarities. We will look for emerging patterns and correlations between user profile information and name preferences. The Nameling is still a very young project and surely needs improvements - but it already yields some astonishing results. Try it out yourself!

Happy browsing!
.folke

Feature of the week: Complete your spheres with recommended users

Although many people usually spend a lot of time at work, most of our lives are probably not centered around a single topic or activity. This is typically reflected in different kinds of people we interact with. Since some time, BibSonomy supports the sharing of resources within different communities via "Spheres" - see Folke's explanation for a brief introduction.

While the composition of some spheres (like e.g. your colleagues at work) is quite straightforward and will not change too frequently, others are somewhat more "lively" - imagine as an example a sphere comprising other researchers working on a similar topic like yourself. In such a case, it is always useful to keep an eye on what is going on, and add potentially interesting users from time to time.

In order to make this easier, we've added "recommended users" to the spheres page (For our power users: This feature will probably remind you of our "similar users".). When logged in, you can find other BibSonomy users which we think might be interesting for you on the top right corner of the sidebar on the spheres page:

Hereby we are computing the similar users mainly based on tag usage - i.e., if other people in the system frequently use similar tags like yourself, we expect that you both share a common interest. Because several similarity measures are hereby thinkable, we've added the possibiliy to choose among them - when you click on the "more" link (see red arrow), you can inspect different recommendations, created by the following metrics:

• FolkRank
• Jaccard Index
• Cosine Similarity
• Cosine Similariy, weighted by Tf/Idf

Although there is an overlap, we expect that the different metrics could be individually useful for finding different kinds of relevant users - empirical studies to this end are part of our research work. In any case, we hope this feature helps you in building great spheres, and finally getting the most out of BibSonomy!

Happy Tagging,

Dominik

In the light of events: BibSonomy's new design

Last week, we did the first step towards our new layout for BibSonomy. Coming up with changes in design had become a necessity over the last years: Change was desired by several of our users and we had noticed increasing difficulty for the integration of new features within the old design.

We have therefore started our redesign, focusing on the post lists and some general elements of the navigation. We plan to continue these efforts for the

• blue header-section (elements like the links to the inbox, clipboard and help have already been moved),
  
• the sidebar,
• the main menu (for now we have simply restructured the entries)
  
• and several other pages like the cv page, the posting dialogues or the discussion pages.

As usual, changes in design are of delicate nature. Next to some few general usability criteria, a lot depends on personal taste or on current trends. Two aspects usually come into play and often contradict each other:

• A new design can make a system more open, more easy to use and more understandable for new users.
• A new design always requires adjustments and new orientation from the current users.

For the new design we have received quite some feedback. While much of it was positive, there has also been some criticism. Rest assured that we always take your feedback very seriously; each contribution is carefully debated in our developer meetings.

We are very content about having such an active and dedicated user base and thank everyone who has let us know of their opinion and has provided helpful hints and recommendations.

One of the main aspects for criticism have been the large fixed elements of BibSonomy (like the header and footer section). While such a fixing has certain benefits (e.g., all navigation elements and all information about the visited page is always available) it has caused usability issues on smaller screens as they “eat space”.

Today we reacted by making all elements scrollable again for smaller screens (less than 900 pixel of inner height). Thus - especially on small screens – it will again be possible to use the full height of your screen for the main content. We hope that this will settle most of the screen real estate problems for now. We have made these space issues a priority in our consideration for future improvements. For example, we will squeeze the representation of single posts in one of the following releases (probably by the end of the month). An idea - currently under discussion - is to make the fixing of elements optional with a switch in the user settings.

Another subject of discussion has been the new set of icons. New icons have to be understood and learned. However, icons also have several advantages over textual representations when they are used as metaphors for often-used features:

• Once they are understood, they are more easy to spot and to hit.
• Icons can summarize long text elements using only little space.
• Icons make the site more lively and are usually better received by new users.
• Especially on a page that is long on text anyway, they are well suited to distinguish the content from the functionality.

We are confident that the new icons will be understood quickly and that much of the functionality is now better represented. All icons are labeled (just hover over them) to make the exploration of their function as easy as possible.

Several other issues regarding smaller details have been remarked by some of you. All of them will be considered and each of you who has sent us some hints, wishes or propositions will receive an answer during the next days.

We wish you lots of fun at using the system in its new layout and hope that some of you will even discover some functions they had not been aware of before. As always let us know what you think (blog, twitter, email) - we are always eager to hear your opinion!

Happy tagging

Your BibSonomyCrew

P.S.: As always, Shift-Ctrl-R helps to empty your browser's cache to savor the latest changes.

BibSonomy Release 2.0.22 - The one with the new Layout

Today, we released BibSonomy in version 2.0.22. The release contains several bug fixes, some internal clean up ...

... and BibSonomy's new design!

If you've read last week's post you already knew, what to expect. Now you can enjoy the real thing. The new layout is based on the design of Daniil Tanygin. All of BibSonomy's functionality has been kept available. Some of it is now more easily accessible: Check out those new buttons we've put above the sidebar for managing your inbox, your basket, your tags, spheres, and settings.
Also new are the preview pictures next to each post. While they tell you the BibTeX type (like article, book, proceedings, ...) as default, once you've uploaded your own copies of publications they will show you previews of them.

We hope, that the new design will make BibSonomy

• more structured
• better arranged
• more comprehensible and accessible for newcomers
• and simply more beautiful.

For newcomers, there has been the appearance setting in your personal settings, with two options "simple" and "advanced". If you are missing entries from your myBibSonomy menu, this might be because this option is set to simple in your settings.

If you have any comments regarding the new layout please let us know (via e-Mail, Twitter or using the discussion options below this post).
We'll report more on some particular changes in the layout in our following feature of the week posts.

The release also included

• further allowed file types for the private documents upload (htm, html, epub) and
• a similar users section on the spheres page.

Enjoy the new look!
Stephan