Feature of the week: Handle "duplicate" publications within groups

As you will surely experience every day, working in teams is common in many fields. The same holds for scientific and research environments; an especially important task in this context is to collaboratively create a shared publication repository, which collects relevant works in your area of interest. Among others, we're currently supporting this setup by our group feature.

Groups within BibSonomy are mainly intended to "collect" each member's resources. A core principle hereby is that each resource can only be changed / edited by its creator. This means that generally, there isn't something like a "group post", but rather a set of individual posts. As a consequence, if more than one group members have a particular publication in their repository, it will appear several times. Consider our KDE group as an example - the URL

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde/myown+2009+similarity

yields "duplicate" entries, because several group members own this post:

While this may be desired in some cases, in others it isn't. When creating a publications list from the group repository, it would be cool to be able to "filter out" duplicate entries. As you will know - if it's cool, then we can do it :) the trick is to use the parameter duplicates=no:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde/myown+2009+similarity?duplicates=no

As you see, each entry is now contained only once - we basically select the first one of a set of duplicates and display it. Of course a backdraft hereby is that only the tags of the selected person are visible, and not the ones of the others. In order to "aggregate" the tags of all people who have annotated this post, use the parameter duplicates=merged:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde/myown+2009+similarity?duplicates=merged

Looks pretty similar - BUT now, the tags corresponds to the summarized annotation by all members. With this and our other features, I hope we can make you a bit mor satisfied!

Happy tagging, Dominik

Feature of the week: Bookmark previews

In the meantime, you'll probably know us, the BibSonomy team, a bit - we're scientists, IT enthusiasts - yes call us nerds ;-) which has one consequence when it comes to how we build platforms like BibSonomy: Adding new and cool functionalities really makes us happy (if you've ever built a similar system, I'm sure you know what I mean). Nevertheless, besides the ambition to optimize and develop things "under the hood", from time to time we're trying to make BibSonomy simply more beautiful. Our new layout was a major step hereby, and today's feature of the week is about a new kind of eye candy: Since our last release, you can see bookmark preview thumbnails next to each bookmarked web page:

What we basically do, is the following: Once every hour, we're taking a snapshot of every new publicly bookmarked website - that's what we display on the left next to the bookmark itself. The idea behind it (besides to make BibSonomy more beautiful) is to provide you visual cues for easier navigation: At least some pages have such a distinct layout, that one can recognize them quickly at a glance. This makes it unnecessary to scan all bookmark titles for the desired page.

Of course the thumbnails are quite small - if you hover over one of them, we display a preview for you:

As you can see (and as Folke already said in hist last post), taking snapshots of web pages can be somewhat difficult and dangerous: Web sites may be temporarily down, contain multimedia contents, be malicious, contain explicit contents, and so on. This is the reason why for some bookmarks, only a default image will be displayed. If you encounter anything within our brand new previews which is not supposed to be there, we'd be very happy to hear from you.

In any case have fun with our new bookmark previews, and happy tagging,
  Dominik

Release 2.0.28

Today we deployed BibSonomy's 2.0.28 release. Most notably this release added previews to your bookmarks:

We carefully tested this feature before making it publicly available - but nevertheless problems may occur. So please let us know if you should stumble upon problems or offending content. In any case: Keep on tagging!