gentlemen, welcome to narnia

seriously, between hubmed, biologging, bloglines, blogger, delicious, and pubsub, motherfuckers are producing a veritable masturbatory-fantasy-world for medical literature freaks like myself. with elsevier's scopus coming on-line this fall, i risk serious dehydrative effects by thanksgiving.

obligatory hopeless wish? it all gets integrated, either via google-buyout or open APIs. there's a lot of duplicated effort going on right now, like both bloglines and biologging letting you create a clippings-blog. unfortunately, having more blogs to manage is the absolute last thing in the world i need. they should just be pushing shit onto blogger using the atom api.

in the absence of completely cross referenced, searchable, commentable, and syndicate-able medical literature, i'm really running into a big -- HUGE -- information management problem...and i don't even have that much literature to go over. i tried using blinkx to index my pdfs, which was nice and light and fast, but it kept on making my linksys wifi router get all crashy. blinkx's tech support has been pretty good: they've asked me to schedule a follow up, but i just don't have time right now, so you might want to give it a try. (it looks really promising for email info overload as well, but my email client isn't supported, which is strange, since mozilla keeps its shit in mbox format).

enter docco, which i found via hubmed's hublog. it's an opensource, java (swing) information-visualization app, backed by a lucene index, and it's pretty cool. take a look at the pretty pictures in the preceding links. they use a technique called formal concept analysis, which means absolutely nothing to me, but it's proving to be pretty useful in managing my folder of JAMIA pdfs. it's not as lightweight or pervasive as blinkx, but i like it none the less -- especially since it's both opensource and java.

anyway, if you run across any other tools in the same vein, please shoot them my way.

regards,
claude e. shannon christos.