“Everyone” knows about del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site which seems to have become the poster-child for tagging. As it turns out, there’s a similar, lesser known site called Connotea.org which is specifically meant for the scientific community:

“This is Connotea, a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group [...] Connotea helps you store your reference list online, which means that it’s readily accessible, it’s linked directly into the literature and it’s easily shared with your colleagues. Opening your references to other researchers enables you to discover new leads by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests to you” (from Connotea’s home page)

We are glad to announce step one in BlogBridge’s integration with Connotea, with the Connotea SmartFeed. Step two is going to be even cooler Here’s what you can see in the current weekly update of BlogBridge, 1.11:

Clicking “Create SmartFeed” in the BlogBridge toolbar, and choose “Connotea” in the drop down menu. This will create a new SmartFeed searching Connotea for references that include the specified tags, “H5N1” in this case. (Know what that is?)

With this a new SmartFeed is created. Whenever this Feed is updated it will check with Connotea for any new references that have been tagged.

Here’s what the new H5N1 Feed looks like right now.

You can see the first few references that mentioned H5N1, and the relevant publications, Effect Measure, EPIDEMIca, Canada.com, Newsday, Manila Times, World Health Organization, etc. Can you imagine how valuable this is for someone working in the field?

Of course this list of references will be constantly updated as new publications or links are tagged by users around the world. (Note by the way, that the tags are determined by the people doing the tagging not by some centralized overseer.)

Pretty cool, eh?

Technorati Tags: connotea, science, tag