First Post!

[Update 2009-11-25: Fixed broken links] This week we missed a huge opportunity to promote our eResearch software The Fascinator, what with the race that stops a nation and all that other spring racing stuff. There were fascinators everywhere, even Toowoomba. But us geeks don't seem to care about horse races as much as we care about repositories so none of us got around to exploiting the PR goldmine.

Oh well. The good part is that instead of getting tipsy and staggering home from the office with his high heels in his hand and his shirt untucked and his fascinator at an odd angle, Oliver Lucido spent the day coding up an AtomPub publishing button for The Fascinator Desktop.

So here we have a document which I have written using OpenOffice.org writer and saved on my desktop.

1. The Fascinator discovered it and showed it to me in my web browser along with all my other stuff.

2. I hit the publish button and gave it the details of my wordpress blog.

Why is this important? Well we're doing this not just with trivial documents like this one, but stuff like research articles and the data that support them, and we won't just be blogging – we'll be backing up, sharing, and sending material to repositories, that's after we have let researchers tag, classify and organize their data.

At this stage the service is text-only, but as as soon as I can I'll post a followup on the work we've been doing with presentations, inspired by Les Carr. Coming soon: SWORD publishing. My aim is to deposit a presentation of mine in the local Eprints via this process:

1. Find the presnetation in a conference repository.

2. Import it into Zotero so I can use it on my CV.

3. Via our Zotero / The Fascinator integration, see it in my desktop-web.

4. Hit the Deposit button to send to USQ's repository.