Stalking Your Fellow Researchers

Apr 3, 2010 Research Tips

At times it seems like the Internet was designed for stalkers–people are increasingly publicizing their personal details on websites like Facebook or Foursquare. While this means that I can get the latest updates from my friends about what they had for lunch, it does not generally help me any with getting the latest news from researchers I’m interested in. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can help solve this problem by giving you a feed of updates for a given webpage. Unfortunately, most personal websites (that aren’t blogs) don’t support RSS. Luckily, there are some handy tools out there which we can use to turn any website into an RSS feed so that you’ll be notified when it is updated.

The first thing you need is an RSS feed reader–a desktop or web application that will aggregate the  updates from the websites you are watching.  I use Google Reader, but there are quite a few out there.

Next, browse to the website that you are interested in tracking, e.g. the publications page of a researcher in your field (my favorite example).  Copy down the URL of the page and then visit Page2Rss.com.  Paste in the URL of interest, and they will magically produce an RSS feed for you that is updated every time the page is changed.  It will automatically send you only the changed version of the page, a very handy feature if you are using this on a long publication page and only care about the most recent changes. Another option if you don’t like RSS, is to use ChangeDetection.com which will email whenever a page is modified (I haven’t tried this yet).

Of course many websites do provide their own RSS feeds, particularly blog or news sites.  A number of CS publications also provide useful RSS feeds, such as the IEEE and ACM.