Over a decade ago RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) was attracting a lot of interest as a way to integrate data across various websites. Many science publishers would provide a list of their latest articles in XML in one of three flavours of RSS (RDF, RSS, Atom). This led to tools such as uBioRSS [1] and my own e-Biosphere Challenge: visualising biodiversity digitisation in real time.

Continuing on from my previous post Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: towards a universal article reader, here are some brief notes on the PLoS iPad app that I've previously been critical of. There are two key things to note about this app. The first is that it uses the page turning metaphor. The article is displayed as a PDF, a page at a time, and the user swipes the page to turn it over.

Being in an unusually constructive mood, I've spent the last couple of days playing with the TreeBASE II API, in an effort to find out how hard it would be to replace TreeBASE's frankly ghastly interface. After some hair pulling and bad language I've got something to work. It's very crude, but gives a glimpse at what can be done.

Following on from my previous post about Wikispecies (which generated some discussion on TAXACOM) I've played some more with Wikispecies. AS a first step I've added a Wikispecies RSS feed to my list of RSS feeds. This feed takes the original Wikispecies RSS feed for new pages (generated by the page Special:NewPages ) and tries to extract some details before reformatting it as an ATOM feed.

I've added Index Fungorum to the list of RSS feeds that I generate at bioguid.info/rss.

Although I'd been thinking of getting the wiki project ready for e-Biosphere '09 as a challenge entry, lately I've been playing with RSS has a complementary, but quicker way to achieve some simple integration. I've been playing with RSS on and off for a while, but what reignited my interest was the swine flu timemap I made last week. The neatest thing about the timemap was how easy it was to make.

Well, not Darwin himself, exactly. The Evolution Directory (better known as "EvolDir") is a mailing list run by Brian Golding at McMaster University, Ontario. It's widely used by evolutionary biologists to post announcements about jobs, courses, conferences, software, and other topics of interest to the community.

ZooKeys (ISSN 1313-2970) is a new journal for the rapid publication of taxonomic names, rather like Zootaxa . On first glance it has some nice features, such as being Open Access (using the Creative Commons Attribution license), DOIs, and RSS feeds -- although these don't validate, partly due to an error at the bottom of the feeds: Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at