Aggademia
Last week on Inside Higher Ed there was an article by Scott McLemee describing his wishlist for an 'academic aggregator' that would both a) collate new information from the web of academic publishing into one place and b) allow people to build directories of links on academic topics.
The follow-up discussion on Crooked Timber and elsewhere (Long Sunday, Epiphatic Exhaustion) seemed to agree this would be a useful idea to put into practice and—coincidentally—it was along the same lines as something I'd been playing with already. To see if it's really an idea that could work, I've put a test site online: Aggademia [update: the site's down for now - it should be back in a better form at some point].
Using Aggademia, you can
- browse through blog posts (aggregated from most of the top 50 popular science blogs, as published in Nature last week) and vote on items (up/down or 1-5: either works, but only the up/down votes are counted in the 'popular' list at the moment) and
- create or join existing groups on particular topics. The owner of a group can edit the official list of links for that topic (using the 'Related Links' box in the 'edit' tab for the group), while other members of the group can make suggestions for useful topic-related links (using 'create weblink' in the group sidebar). To join a group, click 'subscribe' in the group sidebar on the right-hand side.
The aggregation and voting are still very basic and need lots of extra features to be really useful, but this was just a quick experiment to explore what could be done. Comments and suggestions are welcome either in this post or on your own weblog.
As this is my first post, an introduction: I'm Alf Eaton and I started working with Nature's Web Publishing group recently, where I will be experimenting with social software and information management tools for scientists. Previously I have made contributions to online systems for publishing scientific articles, as well as creating the biomedical literature search site HubMed.
Comments
the paper bookmark sharing tool goes into this direction, too
www.citeulike.org
Posted by: Till | July 20, 2006 11:13 AM
Nature actually has a well-developed social bookmarking tool for researchers: Connotea. Hopefully people will bookmark useful links that they find through Aggademia in Connotea too, to share them with the whole network of users.
There's also an interesting discussion to be had about the distinction between static groups (Aggademia) and free tagging (Connotea) for the organisation of topic-specific links.
Posted by: alf | July 20, 2006 11:38 AM
That was a running start.
Do you think that a "digg for science blogs" would not face the problems of similar sites, in particular that complex but insightful contributions cannot compete with simple posts with the right keywords? A post combining "human, evolution, reproduction" will receive good ranks no matter what whereas "Macrophage, apoptosis, receptor" will find to few people that feel attracted to read it, let alone rate it as it's scope is limited to "real" scientists, not an interested crowd?
I guess that the groups are aimed to combat the problem but I would question whether even Nature can attract the critical mass to get several going.
Posted by: Roland Krause | July 21, 2006 09:11 AM
For the voting on articles: yes, a critical mass (of both quality and numbers) is important. Nature's Dissect Medicine is also exploring this space.
I see what you mean about 'popular' articles - being able to show just the 'popular' articles tagged with 'macrophage' and 'apoptosis' might go some way to addressing that.
Posted by: alf | July 21, 2006 09:17 AM
Congrats Alf...! I like features you have in Aggademia.
Posted by: MES - orang paling keren | August 7, 2006 05:24 AM