Connotea -- social bookmarking of references

["Declan Butler, Journalist, Nature" <d.butler@nature-france.com>]

Dear colleagues

I thought you might be interested in this new innovative free web service
from Nature; Connotea -- http://www.connotea.org/ an online reference
sharing system, which works on the basis of collaborative filtering and
sharing by users. It's based on the Del.icio.us social bookmarking system
http://del.icio.us/ but here it is adapted for academics and scholarly
references. Connotea was created by Nature Publishing Group's New
Technology team; it has just started, so content is still a bit limited,
but it's the concept which I thought you might be interested in it has
some neat touches like automatic importing of bibliographic information
for PubMed and some other sites.

It's perhaps slightly off-topic, but I thought it might nonetheless be of
interest to the list -- I've appended some explanatory bumpf below. Do
take a look; comments welcome.

Best
Declan Butler
Nature

Declan Butler
European correspondent, Nature
7 rue Guy de la Brosse
75005 Paris, France
Tel: (33) 1 43 36 59 90 
d.butler@nature.com or d.butler@nature-france.com

*****

To get started quickly, see the site guide. Otherwise, read on for a bit
of explanation about what this is.

Connotea is a place to keep links to the articles you read and the
websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where
you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with
other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are
instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any
computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In
Connotea, every user's links are visible both to visitors and to every
other user, and different users' libraries are linked together through the
use of common tags or common bookmarks. Using Connotea to Bookmark
Articles and Web Pages

Connotea allows you to save links to any online content, making it easy to
store your entire collection of reference materials in one place by simply
saving links to them.

In addition, Connotea recognises links to certain websites, and
automatically collects the bibliographic information for the article or
book that is being linked to. See the site guide for the current list of
supported sites.

We offer a number of easy ways to add to your library - including
one-click saving using bookmarklets and the add form.

Your library is always accessible and easy to share via a simple URL.
Organising Your Library Using Tags

You can organise your collection of references and websites by simply
assigning tags (which you can think of as categories or labels) to the
links you've saved. You can assign as many tags as you want to a bookmark,
and they can be almost anything you like, including phrases.

This is different to the conventional approach of organising papers into
hierarchical folders, and makes your library much easier to navigate. It
takes away the need to put an article in just one place, and removes the
frustration of having to hunt through sub-folders. Discovering New Content
Through Other Users and Tags

Storing your links online, and organising them with simple tags, leads to
some interesting possibilities for discovering new content that is
relevant to your interests.

Because tags are simply words, other users will end up using the same tags
as you. This is an interesting way of finding related content - if you
click on one of the tag names underneath an article title, you'll be taken
to a page that lists all the links that have been given that tag by other
users.

Connotea also gives you a list of related tags. Clicking on those tag
names is another way of finding similar content.

If more than one user has saved the same article, the number of users who
have is indicated with a link. Clicking on that link shows you a list of
all the users who have bookmarked the article, and a list of the tags they
used for it. You can then view another user's entire library by clicking
on their username. Because that user saved the same article as you, you
may be interested in other articles in their library.

For more details on how to use Connotea and for a list of other features,
see the site guide 

Acknowledgements

Connotea was created by Nature Publishing Group's New Technology team. The
ideas behind it come from del.icio.us, a general collaborative bookmarking
service. Connotea takes this concept and adds some features to tailor it
to the needs of scientists. CiteULike is a similar online academic
bookmark management service based on del.icio.us, developed independently
to Connotea. We're in close contact with CiteULike to ensure that our two
systems work well together.