As you’ve noticed, we’ve been focusing hard on new features for ImpactStory profiles.  Today we announce another step towards a great impact profile experience:  a new, simple approach to embedding ImpactStory data on your own website.

An “Embed” link at the top of your profile provides simple HTML code to include in your website.  Just add the line to any webpage and, poof!  Your whole profile is there, with all of your products and their impacts.  You can see it in action on Ross Mounce’s website.

We’ll be decommissioning old-style embedding badges in a month, on January 17th 2014, to streamline our efforts.  We know many of you have included these stand-alone badges on your journal, lab, and personal websites — we’ve loved seeing them there!  We hope you transition to our new embedding model, if it works for you.

We’re deeply committed to great embedding for ImpactStory profiles, because, well, it’s your profile. It should live where you want it to, and look how you want it to look. So we’re excited about continuing to improve the embedding experience. Let us know at feedback.impactstory.org what additional features would help you share your ImpactStory profile in all the ways you want to!

Our blog is part of our scholarly identity, for many of us.  We discuss papers we’ve read, ponder issues we’ve been thinking about, and sometimes release our own early results. Wouldn’t it be great if we could showcase these mini publications on our CV, ideally linked to their readership and discussions in the blogosphere.

Good news: now it’s easy!  Starting today, your blog gets it’s own section on your ImpactStory profile. When you import a blog, we automatically find your most-tweeted posts and pull them into your profile, linked to their tweets, bookmarks, and other metrics. You can curate this list by adding and removing individual posts to feature the ones you’re most proud of.

Even better, if your blog is hosted on WordPress.com you’ll see still more metrics — comments, subscribers, and even pageviews!

We’re excited about the way this rounds out the story you can tell about yourself on your product list, and we think you will be too.  Go give it a try (and if you haven’t done so yet, pull in your top tweets, hook up your figshare account, and add some videos!).

Update: Topsy has ended data access, meaning this feature is no longer available for Impactstory profiles. We’re looking into ways to restore it as soon as we can. If you’re interested in this feature, please vote for it in our Feedback forum.

Do you tweet about your research?  If so, you know meaningful scholarly contributions and conversations happen on Twitter.  In fact, citation guidelines now specify how to cite a tweet [MLA, APA] — a sure indication that tweets are gaining acceptance as mainstream scholarly products.  Which is great… but your twitter contributions don’t make it on to your traditional CV.

We have a solution!  Starting today you can easily highlight your best tweets in your ImpactStory profile!  This allows others to see the work you are most proud of, and makes it easy for you to drill into your impact metrics for your own curiosity:

To get started, just import your Twitter account into ImpactStory.  This will automatically pull in your 10 most popular tweets and their related metrics.  You can also add specific tweets by URL.

We’re excited about this new way to showcase our online scholarly identity, and we think you will be too… give us feedback with your ideas for the future!

Update: Topsy has ended data access, meaning this feature is no longer available for Impactstory profiles. We’re looking into ways to restore it as soon as we can. If you’re interested in this feature, please vote for it in our Feedback forum.

We’re making it easier and more fun to get all of your research into ImpactStory.

Do you have a lot of research at figshare?  Great, just point us to your figshare account!  Or maybe you’ve pulled in coding projects through your Github account.

Starting today, you can also add products from these hosts individually, like datasets you’ve co-authored, or repositories you’ve contributed to.

Just click on the GitHub, figshare, or SlideShare importer tiles and point us to an account, a list of individual products, or both:

      

Have fun pulling in all of your research products!

Do you have thoughts about other ways it could be easier to get your products into ImpactStory?  We want to hear them!  Suggest and vote at http://feedback.impactstory.org!

Update: We’ve made it even easier to import individual GitHub repositories alongside other individual products you want added to your profile. Check out the Knowledge Base to learn more.

We’re big fans of figshare at ImpactStory: it’s one of a growing number of great ways to get research data into the open, where others can build on it.

So we’re excited today to announce figshare account integration in ImpactStory! All you have to do is paste in a figshare account URL; then, in the background, we gather your figshare datasets and report their views, downloads, tweets, and more.

The best part is that you’ll see not just numbers, but your relative impacts compared to the rest of figshare. For instance, here’s a figshare product with 40 views, putting it in at least the 67th percentile compared to other figshare datasets that year.  Here’s an even better one: not only is it in the 97th percentile of views, it’s also been downloaded and tweeted.

If you’ve already got an ImpactStory profile, just click “import products” to add your figshare account (you can also still paste individual DOI’s in the “Dataset DOIs” importer). If you don’t have an ImpactStory account yet, now’s a great time to make one–you can be checking out your figshare impacts in less than five minutes.

figshare’s tagline encourages you to “get credit for all your research.” We think that’s a great idea, and we’re excited about making it easier with ImpactStory.

Head over to your profile on ImpactStory and have a look around — we’ve made some cool updates!

Today’s release includes a smoother sign-up flow for new users, an easy and graphical way to add products to your existing profile, support for more types of research products (Your twitter account!  Your blog on WordPress.com!), and a cleaner profile page.

Check it out, give us feedback, and stay tuned.  We’re super excited because this release is a major update behind the scenes (for our nerdy readers: a rewrite into angular.js) — the stage is set for awesome features in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Scientists make videos.  For lots of reasons: to document our protocols, tell the public about our results, raise money, and sometimes just to make fun of ourselves. 

Who’s interacting with the videos we make?  How many people are watching, sharing, discussing, and even citing them in scientific papers?

You can find out — you can now add your YouTube and Vimeo video research products to your ImpactStory profile!  To add a video to your profile, paste the urls to the videos (ie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d39DL4ed754 or http://vimeo.com/48605764) into the “Product IDs” box when you create a profile, or click the Add Products button on an existing profile.

Behind the scenes, ImpactStory scours the web and gathers data from the video hosting sites and other providers.  Here’s an example that has some video views, some ‘likes’, a tweet, and a citation in a PLOS paper:

Got videos?  Try it out!

ps We’ve got a few more favorite silly science videos that we’ll add in the comments.  Join us — add your favourites in the comments too : )