connotea – delicious for the real geeks
myExperiment reminded me of Connotea, as an example of the way the scientific community adopts Web 2.0 ideas with enthusiasm but makes use of the greater structure in the scientific information space.
Connotea is essentially Delicious for scientists. The main functional difference is that when you bookmark a page from a number of sites (Nature, PubMed, Amazon) Connotea will automatically fetch additional bibliographic information. But really difference is the skew of the communities interests.
At an IASummit a few years back, one of the panels opened with the thought “would you still use Delicious if your gran did”, presumably trying to tap into the fear that your gran might start polluting the links for ‘apple’ with pie and strudel recipes.
Football fans, classic historians and internet geeks might irritate each other with their ‘ajax’ links. In fact, classic historians would probably get on everyone’s nerves.
Connetea’s top tags include biotech, gm crops, evolution and insect resistence.
And ‘celebrity’. Perhaps the world of scientists is not so different after all?