This editorial in Nature asks scientists to “join a social revolution.
Your bookmarks make your web life manageable. But we can all benefit by sharing them.Is the big challenge in the Internet era information overload or underload? Those who complain about the former may simply be inadequately organized. Many tools now exist for taming the flow of scientific information on the web,but scientists have been slow to adopt them and are no doubt missing out on gems as a result. Take, for example,the need to manage the results of a web search. Storing the items selected so that you can easily find them again is often critical. A new generation of ‘social bookmarking’ services now allow a user to post an article or web page with a single click to a personal web collection and to automatically group them under keyword tags. The ‘social’ element arises from the fact that these bookmarks can easily be shared over the web,either selectively or publicly”.