As you may already be aware, Facebook is rolling out the first major update to its News Feed since the feature launched nearly seven years ago. As with every other change the site has made, the new design has been met with mixed reactions and hasn’t gone unnoticed by the media.

Facebook’s revamped News Feed gives the homepage a starkly mobile look, reducing clutter and lending more space to prominent photographs. It takes significant cues from the Facebook mobile apps for phones and tablets, adding a new side navigation bar and more white space.

more…

The “publish or perish” model of the academic world has followed a similar pattern since the middle of the last century. It generally takes around seven years from the conception of an idea, to the publishing of a paper, to the point where a critical mass of citations are formally gathered around it.

“Clearly the world moves much, much faster than that now,” argues Andrea Michalek, co-founder of startup Plum Analytics, with researchers posting slides online about their work even before it’s published, and tweets mentioning those discussions and linking back to the content. “All this data exhaust is happening in advance of researchers’ getting those cited-by counts,” she says, and once a paper is published, the opportunities for online references to it grow.

more…

With more and more social networks appearing on a daily basis, many find themselves with multiple sites to manage and not enough time to do so. Enter RebelMouse, a self-proclaimed “social front page”, that pulls in user content from social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

At first glance, RebelMouse looks like a digital newspaper, hosted on Pinterest. After you spend some time on the site, however, it becomes clear that there is more to it than that. Founded by Paul Berry, the former CTO of The Huffington Post, RebelMouse has already signed up 32,000 users since it’s launch in June.

more…

Google have extended their content offering by launching a much-rumoured Flipboard competitor, Google Currents. It’s a new application for Android devices, iPads and iPhones, that lets you explore online magazines, blogs and news sites through a clean, touch-friendly interface.

Google have worked with more than 150 publishing partners to offer full-length articles from more than 180 editions including CNET, The Guardian, Forbes, Saveur, PBS, Huffington Post, Popular Science and more. Content has been optimised specifically for smartphones and tablets, allowing users to navigate between words, pictures and video on large and small screens alike, even if you’re offline. more…

PLoS and Mendeley recently closed their Binary Battle contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and/or Mendeley’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are some big names on the judging panel, such as Tim O’Reilly (coined the term ‘Web 2.0′), James Powell (CTO of Thomson Reuters) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com).  The entries have been whittled down to 11 finalists and the winner will be announced on 30th November 2011. Read on for details of some of these finalists or go here a full list: http://dev.mendeley.com/api-binary-battle more…

Google+ Pages were announced on Monday, allowing companies of all sizes to post updates about themselves and their products or services. Similar to Facebook, people who follow a Google+ Page can comment on or share the company’s posts, creating running conversation threads. However, businesses can also set up Hangouts where they can chat directly with potential customers.

more…

Following the release of Google’s new social feature, we have added Google+1 buttons to all BMJ and specialist journal articles.  If you’re unfamiliar with this functionality, it is basically a button similar to the Facebook “like”. When you click +1, you’re publicly recommending pages across the web. You can also use +1 to share with the right circles on Google+ (see more on this below).  +1’s can help improve Google Search too, since you can see which pages your social connections have +1′d beneath search results and ads.

Where is it found?
The Google+1 button on our journals can be found in the social bookmarking section of the navigation bar at the side of every article (see screenshot to the left). When you do a Google search you will also see the little +1 button next to each search result. You can then click this button to recommend search listings that you found useful. more…