FWD: THE SCIENCE GUIDE (v. interesting!)

[M. Latterich]

Robert Georgantas mailed this to me - this should be of interest to many.
Please address all correspondence to Robert. Martin


I am a student with the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences 
at Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine.  I have started up a 
small internet site called "The Science Guide" located at the URL 
http://www.scienceguide.com.  I started the site to address the lack of a 
unifying source of information for scientists on the internet.  As you 
can see in the announcement below the Guide consists of a number of 
sections designed to help scientists find information on the internet, 
The news section is currently our most popular service receiving over 4K 
visits per day, with a hundreds of subscribers to the Daily News Emailer.

Since we do not charge for our service, and since we are  not accepting 
advertisers; we have only a small number of routes by which to spread the 
word about the Guide (we have no advertising budget as well).  One of 
these routes is by posting to Usenet groups.  We have done this on a 
small basis by looking at a news group to assure that the users of the 
group are appropriate for our service, and then posting the Announcement 
enclosed below to the group.  We Do Not Spam.  Over the last month we 
have posted to roughly forty news groups and have received a great 
response in the form of emails telling us how useful our site is, and 
will become as we add more content to it.  We have not received a single 
negative response, which we have interpreted to mean that our site is 
useful enough to scientists that they do not mind our "off-subject" 
posting.

That brings me to the crux of the email, I was hoping that you could take 
the time to visit the Science Guide, determine if it would be of use to 
the subscribers of the group which you modify, and if so - post the 
announcement text below to the group. This would be of great help to us 
in getting the word out about the Guide.

If you feel that this posting would be inappropriate, please accept my 
apologies for having taken your time, and just disregard this letter.

One thing that may be particularly of interest, is our plan to start 
monitoring Congress for bills containing items concerning scientific 
funding.  We plan on doing this to take advantage of the power of the 
internet to set up a pseudo lobbying group.  As an example - during the 
Congressional Debates over the NIH budget a few months ago we encouraged 
our readers to email their congress-person asking for an increase in the 
budget.  At the time we had just started the guide and had only a small 
number of readers, but now that we have literally thousands of users (and 
our usership is growing at 40% per week) and we think that we could make 
a significant difference in funding by informing our users of congresses' 
actions and helping them to act in writing to the House, or Senate, or 
President.  

Thank you 
Robert Georgantas - The Science Guide

PS.  You can check to make sure that I am actually who I say that I am 
buy fingering my student email account: rgeorgan at welchlink.welch.jhu.edu. 
 The Science Guide is hosted under the .com domain by Hway Technologies, 
because Hopkins was not willing to host a site with our potential traffic.


------------------Announcement Text------------------------

Announcing the SCIENCE GUIDE.
http://www.scienceguide.com

A New Internet Directory and Information Service run by Scientists and 
Physicians for Scientists and Physicians.  After visiting the Guide, If 
you have any suggestion for making the Guide better please let us know. 
(webmaster at scienceguide.com)

The Science Guide consists of a number of different sections designed to 
help the scientist and physician find information on the internet and to 
sponsor communication between those interested in science:


NEWS SECTION

Every day the Science Guide compiles medical and research news from 
national news sources around the net.  Most of the news articles are 
concerned with medicine, bioscience, and physics, but all other sciences 
from agriculture to zoology are commonly included. News sources currently 
listed include: CNN, EurekAlert, HMS Beagle, MSNBC Sci-Tech, Science 
Magazine's ScienceNow, CBS Space News, USA Today, The Albuquerque 
Journal, Scientific American Web Weekly, The Why Files, Discover 
Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Technology 
Review.  The news pages also list links to news sources not compiled 
within the News site.  We are currently working on adding a number of 
other sources to the site to make it even more useful.

To make getting science news even easier, we send out a DAILY NEWS 
EMAILER listing the articles which have been compiled on our site.  
Anyone can subscribe to the Emailer by sending an email to 
news at scienceguide.com with the message "Subscribe"


DIRECTORY OF USENET NEWS GROUPS and DISCUSSION LISTS

The Directory of Usenet and Discussion Groups is compiled quarterly from 
different sources around the net to provide the scientist and those 
interested in science easy access to these invaluable sources of 
discourse and information.  We are currently working on finding the 
proper subscription method for each of the discussion lists.  This is 
taking a bit longer that we thought so please pardon our dust.  The 
Usenet portions of this section are complete.


ON-LINE JOURNAL HYPERLINK SECTION

The Journals Section contains links to peer reviewed scientific journals 
on the Internet.  Each listing clearly indicates whether the journal 
provides only the table of contents, TOC with abstracts, or the full text 
of the journal


EMPLOYMENT SECTION

The Jobs and Positions Section contains hyperlinks to the best Scientific 
Employment Databases and Classifieds on the net.


GRANTS and FUNDING SECTION

The funding section contains links to the best funding and grant 
databases on the Internet, making it very easy for scientists to quickly 
find funding opportunities.  The featured site of the section is "The 
Community of Science," a Johns Hopkins service designed to help 
scientists find and continue funding.