Rise of the Chemical Blogosphere

Another snippet from ChemBark some months ago but highly relevant
News Story of 2006: The Rise of the Chemical Blogosphere
I have no doubt that the chemical blogosphere is here to stay and adds important new directions. I said this in my presentation at ACS. We can see the time when most facets of chemistry generate social computing in much the same way as other aspects of life do. It’s not a nine-day wonder.
It is becoming increasingly easy to annotate web pages – either directly or through various standoff methods. Social annotation can be at least as good as – and is much cheaper then – annotation by conventional commercial abstracters. If a significant number of chemists make simple comments on papers or other resources they read then we can shortly have an immediate and valuable meta-resource. (We are going to try this out with CrystalEye and the BlueObelisk has already generated some exciting technology). If so see an error in a paper and could comment on it with   a click of the mouse, why wouldn’t you? I have done this for many of the papers in Beilstein Journal of Orgamic Chemistry. Yes, it’s unnatural at the moment but as the MySpace generation moves into chemical research they will have little fear and will regard it as second nature.