Resource of the Week: Knight Science Journalism Tracker
Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
Science news was once relegated to obscure locations inside the newspaper or given brief and/or sensational treatment in the electronic media. Not any more, however. Consider the sheer volume of news coverage devoted to such issues as global warming, pandemic flu, genetically modified foods, cloning, stem cell research, evolution, health care, bioterrorism, catastrophic storms...
While this week's resource is targeted specifically at science journalists, my guess is that you'll find it useful and/or interesting as well -- even if you don't work with science information.
Knight Science Journalism Tracker
Source: Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is a relatively new service for science writers and editors, which provides ongoing access to work being done by others in the same field. "Our goal is to provide a broad sampling of the past day’s science news and, where possible, of news releases or other news tips related to publication of science news in the general circulation news media, mainly of the U.S. Our goal is to have a new batch of posts up each day by 1 pm Eastern time." Here, journalists can "suggest stories and...comment constructively on one-another’s work" -- the goal being "peer review within science journalism."
Archives here go back to April 2006, and the entire site is keyword searchable. You can browse through a collection of Petit’s Picks -- e.g., stories highlighted by the "head tracker." Links on the right-hand side allow you to view only environmental, health & medicine, or general science stories. An RSS feed is available; RSS is the perfect medium for keeping up with a site like this.
If you wish to post to the site, you must register; your identity will be verified as "a journalist or other type of person for whom the site is designed" -- an obvious quality-control mechanism. However, anyone can suggest stories for inclusion.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
