Web 2.0 February 14, 2007
Posted by gordonwatts in science.trackback
As someone was pointing out to me at dinner the other night - I’m never one for getting information onto the blog quickly (or even first). So, in that spirit, I’ll now mention an article that came out on Physics Web a week or so ago. Heck, I’m even quoted in it, so it has to be good. It makes for an interesting review of various Web 2.0 techniques used in physics.
Tagging is one Web 2.0 social mechanism I’m fascinated by — if only because I use it so much to help catalog my pictures. Flickr is an example — the Seattle Sculpture Garden just opened. You can search the tags across all of the users to see everyone’s photographs. So, why not with physics papers? Turns out no one is doing this yet in physics — though they are in biology. The benefits might be that you could find out what other people had tagged a particular paper, and perhaps that would lead you to other papers you were unaware of on the same topic: experts tend to collect clouds of tags around their expert topics. Sadly, not yet in physics. I’ve already started tagging some of my download papers (the Vista OS lets you tag any file) to see if anything happens. But in isolation tagging isn’t nearly as powerful.
Hi Gordon,
Very interesting. We are looking at tagging articles on PhysMath Central. I’ll keep you informed on developments:
http://egglikeabirdsegg.blogspot.com/2006/12/details-about-physmath-central.html
Chris
You may be interested in http://www.citeulike.org . You can add a link to your bookmark bar which will post an article from arXiv.org or a number of journals, which you can then tag and rate how urgently you want to read it. You can also upload a pdf file for personal use. I find this much more convenient than carrying around 8 lbs of preprints to read in my “spare” time.
That site is pretty cool. I like the community tagging feature. For papers I currenlty use only my computer. I have a folder that is shared accross all my various computers (using FolderShare). I download to there. I also have a tablet PC and I use some software called PDF Annotator to write on the PDFs my comments, questions, etc. This way my library follows me around (and I don’t depend on being connected to the web). What would be very cool is if there was a way to integrate my personal library with that web site.
Hey — I typed in “higgs” and a nice set of articles came back! Sweet!
And it has an import feature from BibTeX - something used by a lot of paper writers using TeX.