Quite by chance I met up in the bar yesterday evening with Ian Mulvany (see Nature Network entry) from Nature Publishing Group. Our group had been talking about how we could annotate structures in CrystalEye, the crystallographic knowledgebase that Nick Day has built. The “natural” way to do it would be to build a wiki, set up a registration system, clean the spam daily, etc. A lot of work. And unless people already knew about CrystalEye they wouldn’t use it.
That’s not Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 way is to relax and see who can do the work instead of you. The obvious answer was Connotea: free online reference management for clinicians and scientists. Connotea is one of several exciting new ideas (Urchin, Nature Networks, etc.) to have come out of NPG, and particularly the New Technology Group (if that’s what it’s still called).
About 5 years ago I met up with Timo Hannay from NPG who has been the driving force behind much of this.  Timo sponsored a summer student (Vanessa de Sousa) who built the “Nessie” system for annotating chemistry in published papers – a logical antecedent of current adventures in semantic chemical publishing. (Nessie as a tool has evolved into OSCAR, but the work needs to be remembered). As a result of that I met colleagues from the NTG including Ben Lund, Tony Hammond and now I’ve met Ian.
Back to Connotea. A simple idea – Nature provides a site which allows anyone to register and tag publications they are interested in. Any publication – not just Nature’s. If all papers were tagged then it could be the first place to look for blogosphere comment.  So maybe we could tag the papers from which CrystalEye draws its structures.
It’s easy to do it by hand (you have to register first). Here’s an example. Let’s say I’m browsing CrystalEye for the latest articles from ChemComm (a rapid publication journal of high-interest chemistry from RSC). I find

Covalent Palladium-Zinc Bonds and Their Reactivity

Is this an interesting article? I don’t know. Maybe someone has annotated it in Connotea.
[… I then spent 20 minutes playing with Connotea and I’ll show you how I tagged it and how I can use it  in a future post …]