Notes from the Biomass

Pubcrawler used to be my alerting service; I followed important fields, collaborators, competitors using canned queries at Pubmed and receiving results via email.

After I started blogging, I used RSS readers; it did not become an instant love-on first sight as many RSS readers struck me as bloated and annyoing. However, the Sage extension for Firefox works well for me - no silly icons jumping in my Dock or Panel.
Still, I never got the hang to use HubMed, but after the recent announcement of Pubmed to offer RSS feeds, I decided to give RSS feeds another try and whacked a couple of my important queries into Hubmed and Pubmed and compared the results to the Pubcrawler queries.

While it's a little early for comparative results, but doesn't appear as if the RSS feeds offer much benefits over the good old Pubcrawler - you can't track old results easily, Hubmed often highlights old information as new and Pubmed does not give you previous results, only the newest ones.

Seems like I won't change any time soon - and Pubcrawler has that personal touch to it that makes it fun to use. I should get to an Irish pub soon and drink to it.