Feature of the Week: File-Upload

One of the main advantages of organizing references in BibSonomy is the online availability of your collection. To facilitate your scientific workflow BibSonomy allows not only the storage of a publication's bibliographic data but also to attach a document - e. g., a private copy of the paper or your own personal notes - to your post.
Our last release included a general overhaul of this file upload feature.
It is now possible to store several documents with the same publication. Further, you can now upload your files either

• directly during posting or while editing a post (click edit and then details to edit a post)

• or on the posts details page (simply click on the title of one of your posts to get there).

To retrieve your documents go to the post's details page. Posts that have documents attached are marked with the document symbol on your myBibSonomy page. By clicking on the symbol you can download the first of your documents.

Note, that (mainly due to Copyright reasons) the uploaded documents are private. That is, they are available only to you and to the members of the groups that you have joined.

Feature of the Week: Password Buddies

Lately, we've been working hard to improve BibSonomy's social features. With the recent release we introduced another unique feature that was not announced until now. Following the intuition that secrets are always shared among best friends, our idea is to connect you to people who have the same login password for BibSonomy as you.
This is an outstanding feature that other social networking sites lack up to now - usually, you only get buddies recommended by some black-box algorithm. Our solution is more targeted towards the idea that great minds think alike, and hence choose the same password.
So if you have the same password as other users in BibSonomy, you'll see them in the sidebar in the new "your password buddies" section:

Just have a look at your personal page to get to know your possible new buddies.

Please note that it is possible that some of your password buddies have another password than you because of the possible hash collisions of the MD5 algorithm. Unfortunately we can not solve this issue because we don't store the plain text password, but we are working on an extension of the MD5 algorithm that produces no collisions.

Happy secret sharing!
Your BibSonomy team

Feature of the Week: Use the RSS/Copy Link

As you might already know, BibSonomy features a nice RSS feed for posts, i.e., bookmarks and publications.

An exemplary snapshot of the bookmarks looks like this:


Now, using the copy link you can directly copy entries to your personal posts.


The post can then be edited as usual:


Happy copying (and tagging)!
Martin

Release 2.0.13

Today was our monthly release - 2.0.13. Despite unlucky number 13 BibSonomy is still running and includes now (next to some internal restructuring and optimization) the following features:

• Delicious: Our importer for Delicious bookmarks and Tag-Bundles works now for all Delicious users (we added the functionality for those who use their Yahoo! accounts on Delicious).
  
• System tags: Several system tags are now hidden and visible only to the owners of the according posts. They are also removed from the tag clouds .
  
• RSS Feed: Bookmark RSS Feeds now contain a copy link for each bookmark to conveniently copy bookmarks to your own collection.

We hope you'll find the new features useful and look forward to your feedback.
Happy Tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Optimize your Firefox Browser for BibSonomy

How often do you use the search box of BibSonomy?

You can speed up searching in BibSonomy considerably by creating some
smart keywords in your Firefox webbrowser.
Afterwards, you can access all your posts with a certain tag with just some keystrokes. This blog post explains how to do this.

First try: Speed up fulltext search

1. Navigate to www.bibsonomy.org.
2. Right-click on the BibSonomy search box that says fulltext search here. Select Add a Keyword for this Search...
   
3. In the dialog that appears, enter a short keyword, e.g., bs (like BibSonomy search).
   
   
4. Fill the remaining fields and click Save.

Now you can search in BibSonomy by entering into your browser's location bar (reach it quickly with CTRL + L) the string bs SEARCHTERM, e.g., bs firefox and pressing ENTER. Firefox will then search for the term SEARCHTERM in BibSonomy, e.g., bs firefox opens www.bibsonomy.org/search/firefox.

Next steps: Add more keywords

Adding smart keywords for other search options in BibSonomy is now easy: just select the corresponding option in the dropdown box

and repeat the steps above with a new keyword. Here are some suggestions:

bt

search for a tag (e.g., /tag/firefox)

ba

search for an author (e.g., /author/Stumme)

bm

search for one of your tags (e.g. /user/jaeschke/myown). This is explained in the next step.

Finally: Quickly access your own posts

Adding a smart keyword to access your posts having a certain tag is now straightforward: go to your BibSonomy page and right-click into the enter tag(s) here field at the top. Again, select Add a Keyword for this Search...

and enter an appropriate keyword (e.g., bm for my tags).

Here I describe a more advanced method that searches for concepts instead of tags. Note that this works even if you don't have relations defined, yet!

1. Go to www.bibsonomy.org/concept/user/jaeschke/arbitrary_tag and exchange the user name in the URL by your user name, e.g., replace "jaeschke" by your user name. Press ENTER.
2. Right-Click in the input box containing the string arbitrary_tag and select Add a Keyword for this Search...:
   
   
   
   
3. Again, enter a smart keyword (I would suggest to use bm as described above.).
4. Search for your posts by entering bm TAGNAME into the location bar of your browser (remember CTRL-C).

Nothing new so far, except for the somehow difficult to access concept search field. But what are the benefits of /concept/user/jaeschke/programming compared to /user/jaeschke/programming? Well, I have created some relations using the tag editor of BibSonomy. One of them says that the tags ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, and ruby are sub-tags of the tag (or better concept) programming:

Now, whenever I search for /concept/user/jaeschke/programming, I get all posts having the tag programming or one of its sub-tags, i.e., ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, or ruby.

This way I can structure my tag space - and more important - use a logical OR in my queries.

More information about concepts and relations can be found here:

• BibSonomy Help: URL Scheme Semantics
• BibSonomy Help: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations (revisited)
• BibSonomy Blog: Retrieve resources by disjunction of tags

Feature of the Week: Hidden System Tags

System tags are an easy means to facilitate your work with BibSonomy. Simply tagging a post with such a tag allows for example to forward that post to friends (send:xyz) or to a group (for:xyz), to mark the post as authored by yourself (myown) or to mark it relevant for a group (sys:relevantFor:xyz).
Until recently, heavy use of system tags would have caused such tags to appear in your post lists and in your tag cloud - often larger than other tags due to frequent use. We believe, that tag clouds should represent you and your interests rather than your habits. Therefore, several system tags are now hidden from both, tag cloud and post lists. As an example see the two tag clouds below.

The first one is the old version where no system tags are hidden, while the second one is what the cloud currently looks like. In the new cloud, the system tags

• sent:anton (indicating that posts were sent to user anton) and
• sys:relevantFor:kde (meaning a that posts were marked relevant for the group kde)

are hidden while the system tag myown appears in both clouds. Note, that the latter tag is not hidden since it not only makes posts appear on your CV page, but contains information about you as an author, which can be of relevance to you and other users as well. The other two tags simply provide functionality but are not informative as such. They have therefore been classified as hidden system tags.
In post lists (like on the home page or user post lists) hidden system tags are generally not displayed. However, on your own posts - if tagged with hidden system tags - you will find a small cog wheel symbol like here:

Hover with the mouse over the symbol and the system tags of that post will appear. Hidden system tags are also visible to you during any kind of post editing. Thus the functionality of such tags is ensured and stays transparent.

Happy (system) tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Delicious Importer

BibSonomy supports its users in their scientific work by providing easy means to manage publication references and bookmarks. Since one of the most essential parts of work is the exchange with other folks, BibSonomy offers both export and import facilities to allow an easy and quick exchange of content with other people or even other systems.
A very popular bookmarking web service is Delicious. For quite a while now, BibSonomy contains an importer that can fetch your Delicious content and store it within your BibSonomy collection.

Since 2005, Delicious is run by Yahoo (only recently it was sold to Avos Systems), who enabled a new registration method: As an alternative to the creation of an extra Delicious account, users can use their Yahoo account to log on to Delicious.
However, with the new accounts also the interface to fetch posts changed, including the authentication protocol (to OAuth).

BibSonomy now provides two Delicious importers, one for the original and one for the Yahoo accounts. Both are found in your BibSonomy settings under imports below the Firefox importer. Both importers have two options:

• What to import? Delicious bookmarks will be stored as BibSonomy bookmarks. Delicious tag bundles will be stored as relations (concepts) in BibSonomy. The bundle name will become the supertag and all the bundle tags will become its subtags.
• Overwrite? In case you have bookmarked the same URL in BibSonomy and in Delicious you can decide whether the Delicious posts should replace those in BibSonomy.
  

To import from an old account (left) enter your Delicious user name and password and click import.
To import from a Yahoo account (right) just click import to be directed to Yahoo, where you will be asked to log in and then to agree to allow sharing of Yahoo info with BibSonomy.

In both cases, your posts or relations will be stored in your BibSonomy collection.

Happy tagging!
Stephan