When I blogged about the potential for a Social ROUTES? collaborative bookmarking system, I had in mind something built upon del.icio.us.
Del.icio.us has been going from strength to strength, lately, not only in terms of 3rd party tools and extensions (the AJAX enabled del.icio.us direc.tor is one of my favourites... for a complete list, check out the Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection).
However, there are still a few things that del.icio.us doesn;t do, such as support group tagging (i.e. one account with several members).
So it my interest was aroused earlier this week when I stumbled across Connotea, a social bookmarking service for academics set up by the Nature Publishing Group (who have graciously open-sourced software). I was reminded about Connotea again today when following a short post to the del.icio.us mailing list about Social ROUTES (that did not mention Connotea) I got this presumption(!) from Tony Hammond at NPG:
[Connotea] provides a growing body of reference management functionalities and will query authority sources for metadata (both publisher-specific platforms and also CrossRef). It supports RIS import/export, RSS feeds, etc. DOI bookmarking is a new feature as of last week, and in the next few days we expect to turn on OpenURL linking. What else? Oh user groups, private bookmarking, embargo dates, and a bunch of other stuff. Connotea is under active development and is a free service being run by NPG.
Good, eh? Tony also provided a couple of links to articles about Social Bookmarking tools in general, and Connotea in particular, which are well worth a look:
Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Overview
Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund and Joanna Scott, Nature Publishing Group
doi:10.1045/april2005-hammond
Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea
Ben Lund, Tony Hammond and Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing Group; and Martin Flack, NeoReality, Inc.
doi:10.1045/april2005-lund
Connotea also link to another social bookmarking site for academics - CiteULike. Again, this appears to offer support for groups, and a useful looking Import from BibTex facility. Unlike Connotea, which has corporate support, CiteULike is a personal venture. However, del.icio.us got funded, so perhaps CiteULike will find a benefactor too (surely JISC must be able to support this sort of thing?)
When I get a chance, I'll explore the Connotea and CiteULike sites in a bit more detail, and then perhaps post an updated doodled on the potential of a Social ROUTES system...
PS here's another social bookmarking system for education undergoing tests: ScuttlEDU.
Posted by ajh59 at July 26, 2005 01:46 PM