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

1. 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
2. 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.

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

1. 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
2. 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.