Scintillation

There are a couple of very useful bookmarklets on Scintilla's 'tips' page. The first - "Find in Scintilla" - is for when you've followed a link to read a story on the original site, or just ended up on a science blog post while wandering around the web, and want to get to that item on Scintilla in order to rate that story or recommend it to someone. Click the bookmarklet and if that item is found in Scintilla you'll be taken straight to it.

If the item unfortunately isn't found in Scintilla, it might be brand new and hasn't been indexed yet, or the source might not have been added to Scintilla. In the latter case, let us know and we'll look into adding the source as soon as possible.

The second bookmarklet takes the text you select on any web page and runs a "More Like This" analysis against Scintilla's index of blog posts and news items. This is a good way of quickly finding more items that discuss topics similar to the page you're currently reading.

Posted by Alf Eaton on November 02, 2007
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Perhaps you already use Scintilla to keep track of papers, news items and blog posts that discuss your particular area of interest. Perhaps you've never heard of Scintilla before (in which case you should give it a go).

Maybe, though, you tried it once but couldn't work out why it'd be worth visiting regularly when you've already got PubMed email alerts, an RSS reader and Google Blogsearch working just the way you want them to?

If that's the case then (a) congratulations, you're more web savvy than the vast majority of other scientists (or maybe just better organized) and (b) you're still missing out.

Social features have been an important part of Scintilla since the project began. We can and do work on algorithms to present you with information that we think you need or might like but right now the best sources of recommendations are people who know you - your contacts on the site.

Once you join groups and build up a network on Scintilla you start to get much more out of it. It's still a little bit harder than it should be - we're aware of that, but it's one of the drawbacks of a release early, release often approach we took. Over time you'll see better integration with places like Nature Network and Connotea.

At the moment most of the groups on Scintilla are communities of interest - Open Science and Best of the Blogs are two popular groups to which members recommend relevant blog posts, articles and papers.

Alternatively check out some pretty pictures collected from blog posts - the one above is of Mira's recently discovered 'tail' - or the many ways that we're all going to die.

Do have a browse around. It's more work orientated than Facebook and less boring than an eTOC (ah, excepting Nature's, of course).

Posted by Alf Eaton on August 18, 2007
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