Today marks the beginning of a new program to bring you, the Laboratory Automation community, the best in news and information about our field.  This month sees the introduction of the first initiative, a live news feed from Meltwater Inc.  The Lab Man talked with ALA president Jim Sterling, about Meltwater and the overall ALA information program.

Jim indicates that if you go to ALA's website today, you'll see a scrolling feed of laboratory automation related news items.  This is brought to you via collaboration with Meltwater, Inc., a Norwegian-based company that uses a proprietary state-of-the-art search platform which sifts through more than 14 billion matches daily.  The company developed one of the first electronic news agents in 1996. Experiences from a two-year research program in cooperation with the Norwegian Computing Centre and funded by the Norwegian Science Foundation are integrated into the current Meltwater News solution.

According to Jim, the sophisticated keyword searches behind the news feed have been designed in collaboration with a team of ALA member experts.  But even sophisticated searching still gathers a considerable amount of extraneous material, so the same team of ALA experts (including The Lab Man) do a daily selection of the literature "hits" before they are placed into the news feed.  This way we can assure the information you see is either directly related to laboratory automation or an interesting similar technology.  For instance, in today's feed is an article telling us that "Scientists at Tufts University have received a $3.3 million contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop chemical robots that will be so soft that they will be able to squeeze into spaces as tiny as 1 centimeter, then morph back into something 10 times larger, and ultimately biodegrade."  Perhaps someday we'll see those used for process chemistry assays?  Who knows?

Since ALA is a technology focused organization, one would expect this newsfeed to take advantage of the latest in information-sharing technology!  Jim relates that one can subscribe to The ALA Global LabAutomation Newsfeed as an RSS feed.  This is available to anyone, not just members.  The Lab Man has the RSS feed going right to the top of his My Yahoo home page, ahead of his finance, sports and even Netflix feed!  ALA can also insert its own news items, to keep you up-to-date on association happenings.  We can also insert news items that you submit, so feel free to email a link or a note to The Lab Man if you think something should be in the feed!

Why is ALA doing this?   Jim says it's all part of the latest version of the ALA strategic plan, the cornerstone of which remains offering education and information to the laboratory automation community.  The latest ALA member benefit survey indicated that the #1 perceived benefit of ALA membership is being connected to the latest and best information about our field, through a variety of means such as the LabAutomation conference, JALA, short courses, Spotlight Series, and of course (Ahem!) The Lab Man blog & podcast.  This new service is part of a new initiative to take this to mission to new heights using web-based technology.

You'll see more developments from this new program over the coming months, so watch the newsfeed carefully.  We'll let you know when something new is about to happen!  Give us some feedback - please!  We value your opinion.

Until next time,

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto