Connotea - Applying Those Social Values to Science. Web 2.0 Europe, European Web 2.0

Posted on August 21, 2006
Filed Under European Web 2.0, New Tools |

Nature happens to be one of the most important publishing groups in science but that hasn’t stopped it becoming an innovator and a flag waver for Web 2.0 Europe.

It’s application of social media should finally force us to think beyond link sharing (which is effectively what Digg et all become) to more purposeful applictions of the new web medium when coupled to collaborative values.

Connotea is its social media reference saver and sharer. Imagine you locate an interesting article or quote…. connotea allows you to highlight, click, save and share it (it also records the URL).

You can also research within the reference base of other users or share your with a workgroup. And of course you can add notations.

There are pages for popular links, recent links and popular tags.

Connotea has in fact been a long time coming. If you think back to the origins of computing, it was Vannevar Bush back in 1945 whose inquiries into structured information led to the computing paradigm.

Bush, overwhelmed by the level of data pouring out of public bodies during World War II, wanted to know how to improve the management of excerpts and citations. Connotea delivers.

Where the social bookmarking sites seem to add to the sense that information is arbitrary and overwhelming, Connotea ought to provide some sanity.

I know the first of these two statements is not a popular point of view.

In fact Nature’s own gurus themselves contend, in a lengthy paper on social bookmarking, that these architectures of participation create new information value and they cite Wikipedia and Amazon as examples.

Look at it another way - discovery is a satisfying process but discovery for no real purpose is a satisfying way of wasting your time, and that is what a lot of us are doing.

Connotea holds a lesson for Web 2.0. Applied to a purpose social software begins to exhibit the potential for profound benefits.

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