Onfolio.Blog

Onfolio Review in Information Research Journal

Professor T. D. Wilson, Editor of the Information Review journal has posted a review of Onfolio Academic and Scientific Edition. The review is thorough and accurate, but I did want to comment on two benefits of Onfolio that Mr. Wilson didn't cover. These benefits have to do with Onfolio's ability to automatically scrape citation data from certain web sites that host scholarly works and store that data with the article in your Onfolio collection or capture that data directly to an EndNote library from an RSS feed.

Automatic Reference Capture
Mr. Wilson mentions that when you capture an article from the web into an Onfolio collection, Onfolio only captures the title and abstract, and that all other data needed for a good citation of the article being captured into Onfolio will need to be added manually. What he didn't mention is that Onfolio has  an extensive list of academic journals, AI databases and general news sources from which we can automatically capture all the data you will need to cite the item being captured. You can see the whole list here. So, for example, if you were to capture the PDF of a journal article from ScienceDirect, Onfolio will automatically populate all of the reference fields that you would need to cite the article being captured and synchronize that data with an EndNote library.

Capturing References from RSS Feeds into EndNote Libraries
Onfolio uses this same process in its RSS reader, making it possible to capture the reference for an article that's linked in an RSS feed right (Journal TOC's, PubMed Searches, etc.) into an EndNote library (screenshot). This is a great way to skim through all the new articles in your field and capture the references for the articles you are most likely to cite into an EndNote library with one click.

So, with these two things in mind, go ahead and check out the full review here.

RSS and Onfolio in USA Today

You known something is going mainstream when it hits the hotel floors, airport lounges and bathroom stalls in everyone’s favorite quick read – USA Today. Yesterday, they had a useful piece by Anh Ly called; RSS feeds college students' diet for research. This story has some interesting quotes from people in the academic world about the benefits of RSS:

"It saves me a lot of time and energy," says Ediriwickrema, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. "I can quickly find what I'm looking for without having to go from Web site to Web site, and I get the most up-to-date information."

and...

For Sara Knechtel, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, RSS comes as a relief from the proliferating sea of bogus information on the Web.

Another quote I like from the article is where the author describes how the typical single-page presentation of RSS feeds gives, "the added benefit of tracking a large number of sources in one place, making it easy to compare the usefulness and credibility of different sources."

In doing demos to research librarians, student, researchers and professors over the last several months, I have found that most people get these benefits quickly when they see Onfolio's RSS reader in action, even though for the most part none of them were very interested in RSS at the beginning of the demo. Recently, I've been demoing a new feature that we haven't quite released yet that allows you to capture bibliogrpahic references from an RSS feed directly into EndNote. This has made people even more exciting about RSS because with this combination of features, it's now very easy to monitor developments in an academic discipline and populate and EndNote library with references in a single step.

The story also talks about the fact that for people doing a lot of research, having just an RSS reader alone isn’t really enough – you need a tool that can also help you capture and organize the information you find through your RSS feeds. They compare Onfolio and Pluck, and give Onfolio the nod for people who do “serious research.”

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-08-01-rss-research_x.htm

Feature Preview - Volunteers Needed

Next Tuesday (July 19th) we will be doing online demos of some upcoming new features that make Onfolio a little more appealing for people doing academic and scientific research. We are looking for volunteers who are interested in such functionality to sit through a brief demonstration of these new features and then tell us what you think about them and how you might use them. If you would like to participate in one of these sessions, please send me an email (sebastian at onfolio.com) and I'll schedule you. We are especially interested in people who use EndNote, but anyone who has an interest in managing bibliographic reference data would be interested (we hope) in the new features. If you can't make it on Tuesday, but would still like to participate, still get in touch, and we'll work something out.

Making 'Add Feed' Simple

Jeffrey Veen is continuing the discussion about how to represent 'Add Feed' to users, struggling to find a better alternative than the orange XML icon (and the subsequent click through and viewing of heinous and confusing xml). Its a valiant struggle, but I think the effort is futile. You simply shouldn't need a visible link in the web page for users to add a feed. The most lucid approach is explained (briefly) by Sam Ruby in the comments- let the reader applications do the work rather than trying to do it yourself! (Because let's face it, you've got a lot of explaining to do if you're trying to help users who don't understand RSS and showing them the guts of the system doesn't really help. Maybe instead, you should try explaining the web by discussing HTTP Gets and Posts!).

Onfolio takes an approach that I really like (not suprisingly). Since it is embedded in IE or Firefox, and it includes a toolbar that appears in the top right hand corner of the browser, we can make adding a feed very straightforward, and not rely on the web page to try to make it easy on users. Here's a nice little picture of how Onfolio looks in Firefox.

When you navigate around the web, Onfolio's toolbar is keeping an eye on the pages that you are viewing and looking for link tags that provide a feed url. When the toolbar detects one for the current page, it lights up:

Press the button, and you add the feed to Onfolio.  It's really that simple.  At no point are you required to view XML.  If you're visiting a page that doesn't include a feed, the button is still there, but it isn't lit up, indicating that there isn't a feed here:

Pretty straightforward for users- they just press add when they want to add a feed. It even supports multiple feeds on a page (for example, our support forum home page has feeds for each of our forums)- when you press 'Add Feed', you get prompted with a dialog asking which feeds you'd like to subscribe to, and showing you as list of the choices.

There are a couple of the advantages of this approach:

1) Users always know how to add a feed- press the add feed button. This means that there is no need to search the page for a link somewhere, sometimes as a text link, sometimes as a button.  There is no need to copy a feed url, or drag a link, etc...  Press a button. Nice.

2) There is a consistent way for authors to notify feed consuming applications that feeds are available- in the page itself. No need to get users involved in the implementation details such as syndication using a particular xml format. (I'm especially bummed out about pages that let you choose atom or RSS, I mean do I really need to make that choice?). Just include a link tag the provides the feed urls, and the reader applications should take care of the rest.

River Of News

Dave Winer posted a pointer to an RSS reader developer struggling with the best way to present feeds to users. Dave points out (rightly so) that he has been suggesting a 'River of News' layout for some time (like 3 years). And Dave is mostly right- 'River of News' is a great way to read. A web page has a form factor that is simply superior to most alternatives- it is a flowing layout with large fonts, images, and scrolling behavior that works for users.  It is like reading a web page, which is a pretty awesome experience.

This works pretty well.  The problem I see with the 'River of News' is that it pays no mind to what you've read and what you haven't read. For some feeds, this isn't really much of a problem- if I miss a post from Engadget, not a big deal. I do have feeds, however, that provide extremely valuable information (how about search feeds about the product that I work on, search feeds for our competitors, or my feed from our support forum). I care a lot that I read each of the posts and that I don't miss any.  So what I want is a 'River of News' that maintains read / unread state- it provides the reading experience of a web page, but is mindful of making sure that I see new things and don't see old things.

That's why I love the Onfolio newspaper view- its designed to deliver on the 'River of News' but preserve my read state so I don't miss anything.  Maybe the river needs a little updating after 3 years?

Welcome to Onfolio.Blog

Welcome to Onfolio.Blog. Just Monday, we released Onfolio 2.0,  a feature packed new release. This release includes a number of substantial improvements over Onfolio 1.0, including:

• A browser embedded RSS packed with features
• Full integration with Firefox
• Performance improvements
• Workgroup support with network shared collections
• Automatic publishing of folders to structured reports
• Support for publishing to blogs
• Capture of sites, multi page articles, modeless capture, and silent capture
• A docking version of the Onfolio Deskbar
• Microsoft Outlook Integration
• Advanced Searching
• And a whole lot more.  Read the complete list here.

We worked hard trying to pack Onfolio 2.0 with features that customers have requested as well as with innovative new features that provide whole new realms of functionality to Onfolio users. Our users were instrumental in making Onfolio 2.0 a great product, both in terms of feature design and in terms of quality.

That brings me to the rationale behind the Onfolio.Blog. We're already hard at work on the next release of Onfolio, and we want to make sure Onfolio users have a place to hear what we're up to straight from Onfolio. We plan to keep you up to date with previews of features that we're working on, perspectives on news and trends that affect Onfolio users, and links to other relevant information.

We're thrilled to be working on Onfolio- and working with all of you. Hope you enjoy the blog!