Scintilla - a required application for surveying science blogs
This is an entry that should have been written back in June, a time that pre-dates my involvement with Action Potential! Back then, nature.com incorporated and launched a new free service called Scintilla that collects data from hundreds of news outlets, scientific blogs, journals and databases and then makes it easy for the user to organize, share and discover exactly the type of information in which he or she is interested.
Scintilla incorporates interesting features from several different Web 2.0 technologies including The Hype Machine (aggregation), Google Reader (checking selected sources), last.fm (recommendation engine based on other users’ activities), and del.icio.us (social network based around content). It is pretty slick and easy to use. For the content producers, here is a statement from NPG. They even have an interesting solution for science bloggers concerned about losing advertising revenue to those reading through this service.
Give it a try and tell me what you think.