Some pieces of though about INFOXICATION

INFOXICATION

Current society uses Internet as an everyday tool for posting, gathering a sharing of information. Because a big percentage of the World population has access to the net, we can assume that there is a great number of sources of information, that work continuously feeding Internet.

If one thinks as a final user of this information, it is easy to understand that it is not possible for a single individual to read, understand, analyse, ... all the content that is available in the net. As a consequence, if we are not conscious of this fact, we will be facing a great problem of inefficiency, both because we spend great time reading all the pages that have interesting content for use, or because once we have finished reading our list of sources, we could be tempted to start from the beginning, just in case there has been posted anything new.

For these reasons, we could think in to steps that could help us to gather as much information as possible, but avoiding those factors that would lead us to a great loss of time, or that could prevent us from dedicating enough time to other tasks related with our jobs, researches,... 

The first step, is to be conscious of which sources are important for us, select them, and gather as much publications, news,... as possible. If it is possible, it would be desirable to first have all that unread information in a single box, or database.

The second step is selection. According to our own specifications, all those articles should be filtered. Any information that would not accomplish our specifications shall be trashed. Finally, the successful articles should be correctly ordered, organised and displayed if possible into a single desktop.  If these tasks were performed automatically by a program or script, the human user would lose no time everyday in searching the information that should be relevant for his purposes.

The third step is setting updating alarms. If a proper proceeding was established, there would be no need for the human user to continuously refreshing his main sources in search for possible news. For that reason, a program shall be used to scan the preferred sources, and if any new matched the filters, an alarm or message should be sent to the user inbox. 

Finally, research and many nowadays jobs are collaborative, so each user should have the opportunity to share not only his publications, but also any information that was important or interesting for him or any colleague that the former could think that he would find of interest.

Content curation

In order to avoid the negative effects that Infoxication can produce in our digital society as a general term, and in ourselves as users or citizens, there are some online tools that can help us with this task.

Storify is a tool that can gather articles, information, ... from many journals or sources into one single desktop or database. It can even produce a feed to insert this database in our own web page, blog,... Together with The previous tool we can find Scoop.it. The latter has similar characteristics than the former, but it is more dynamics regarding the topics selected or the filters stablished within the incoming news.

Readlist is another content curation tool. It is not as visually atractive as the previous ones, but it is simpler, and has a very important characteristic, that is able to export offline the content into a readable document. Furthermore, it also has the possibilty of exporting the content to another website as a RSS feed, the same way as it was explained with Storify.

Finishing with the tools dedicated to creating list of news or recently updated articles with special insterest, we can find List.ly. The list of content created by this tool can be filtered, ordered, and even commenter or voted by other users. Other users can even be invited to collaborate in creating the lists.

Pinterest is a tool that makes its effort in publishing images, instead of writed news or articles. This fact makes this tool very atractive for many users, and as a consequence it has become very popular in the last years. The contents of the users ar organized in desktops, named as topics.

Pearltrees is a collaborative tool that relates the content selected by other users with some labeled topics. This tools displays the content or topics in branches, that outsource from common nodes, or main topics. The final node, or branch, stores the link to a webpage, but the tool allows a to see a preview of the content, so there is no need to exit Pearltrees to read the article.

Alltop a a very extense tool whose database does not depend on the user. Instead, the user is able to select which topics and sources are interesting and relevant for him. This tool focuses its attention in blogs and information web pages, instead of social networks. From every source, Alltop displays the five latter publications.

Feedly

Feedly is a tool that helps with the gathering, filtering and displaying of information tasks. The user can have access to the most recent and relevant information, organised by projects, topics. It uses RSS feeds from journals or sources selected by the user. If a premium account is purchased, an RSS link can be provided, so the feeds selected or that belong to a desired group can be linked to another web page or blog.

The selected journals, which are considered to be important for my investigation are:

• APPLIED MATERIALS TODAY - Elsevier
• ENGINEERING FAILURE ANALYSIS - Elsevier
• INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FATIGUE - Elsevier
• MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING - Elsevier
• WEAR - Elsevier

Diigo

Diigo is a tool that allows its user to gather all his selected web pages, documents, sources,... in a single desktop. These data can be labelled, organised, commented, annotated,... 

Then, the user can group some of the data, that would be necessary or relevant for a specific project, into an ooutliner, and then order them hierarchically. Each of the lines of the outline store a link to the corresponding webpage, and if selected, an active window displays a preview of its content.

My personal profile can be seen following the link that is displayed below.

Perfil- Daniel Ballorca-Juez

The following link will drive you to the line generated to follow my doctorate research on high pressure dynamic seals.

Diigo- Daniel Ballorca-Juez