My Sunday afternoon recover-from-jetlag hack was creating phygg. Phygg is designed to help sort through physics papers and discussion topics related to arXiv.org in the style of digg.com, initially focusing on astrophysics.
I’m using phygg to track papers I find interesting, so feel free to follow the rss feed. In addition, I’m convincing a few of my astrophysicist colleagues and readers to join in on the posting and voting, so sign up if you fall into that category and get started.
In other news, as of yesterday I’m back in Zürich returning from an adventurous summer in startup land to work on my PhD fulltime. This semester, I’m a teaching assistant for Mathematical Methods in Physics and locking myself in my apartment/office to try to get enough done research-wise to make up for taking the summer “off”.
Hi Christine,
Saw the story on Phygg on the Technology Review blog – nice. A ratings/recommendation system for Arxiv is something lots of people have talked about in the past – great that someone has made it happen. I just signed up 🙂 Do I understand correctly that it relies on people uploading papers to the site and commenting on them? Rather than, say, pulling in the astro-ph (etc) RSS feeds automatically so that everything is there to comment on? Is there anything else you’re planning to add?
Hi Sarah, I have just added pulling from the rss-feeds of all the Physics arXiv sections (previously it was only astro-ph and gr-qc), you can sort by the sections by going to the arXiv menu under the phygg.com logo.
I’ll gradually be adding features as I have time and people suggest them so if you find something just send me a comment/note/tweet.
Hey, just started using Phygg yesterday. I love the idea: I’d like to use it to initiate group discussions at my institute.
A few feature requests:
-A forum (or ability to comment) for a group
-Private comments on papers (i.e., comments visible only to a group)
-Private (group-only) voting
A little more documentation would be helpful on the site – e.g., what does it take to get things from “shared” to “upcoming” or “published” categories? Maybe that exists on the pligg site…
Also, when you edit a group, the “Save” button has the text “Edit Group”
Hi, Thanks for the feedback. The private comments and group only voting do already exist (in the settings when you create a group).
The forum is a great idea as is the increased documentation (and perhaps a way to contact the admin-me).
Thanks for the bug report on the text as well.
Amazing idea! I’ve just created an account there! Keep going!
thanks! hope to add new features soon: improved stability, better rss feed parsing formatting, and TeX rendering…
I have a question: is there a way to change the group picture after group is created?
Ps.: I’ve already convinced almost all members of the research group which I am part of, and now I own the biggest group in Phygg! lol.. I really, really loved the idea!
awesome! if you go to groups->your group you should see “upload avatar”. let me know if you have troubles.