I just got an IM ping from someone who was curious as to what was in the pile of articles I've decided to bring with me on my trip.
Right now my mind is buzzing with questions and ideas related to social bookmarking systems (like del.icio.us or Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0), information-seeking behavior, and information network formation, so most of my reading has at least a tangential connection with those topics. In no particular order, here's what I'm planning to dig into tomorrow:
- Epistemic communities: description and hierarchic categorization, by Camille Roth and Paul Bourgine
- Evolution of indirect reciprocity, by Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund
- Information dynamics in the networked world, by Bernardo Huberman and Lada Adamic
- The structure of collaborative tagging systems, by Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman
- Social bookmarking in the enterprise, by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr
- Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea, by Ben Lund, Tony Hammond, Martin Flack and Timo Hannay
- The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (to review the maven and connector descriptions)
- The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (if I can find it; I may have left this in Rochester, in which case it will go in the to-read pile for the trip back west)
- What's Mine is Ours, or Is It? A Study of Attitudes About Information Sharing, by David Constant, Sara Kiesler, and Lee Sproull (retrieved through RIT library databases; not on the public web)
- * Not Just a Matter of Time: Field Differences and the Shaping of Electronic Media in Supporting Scientific Communication, by Rob Kling and Geoffrey McKim
- Information Needs and Uses: Fifty Years of Progress?, by T. D. Wilson
- Open Rating Systems, by R. Guha
- Embedded Media: What We Know, Who We Know, and Society Online, by Philip Howard
I'm also listening to Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked on my iPod this week, and have ordered the book to be delivered to me in Rochester (I pay sales tax to Amazon if I have it delivered to me in Seattle, so it's worth getting it while in Rochester and lugging it back!)
Y'know, I'd really like a tool to allow a select group of people to build a collaborative bibliography. Something like CiteULike, but with the ability to create a specific set beyond simple tagging, and allow it to be added to by specific people. Is there any such collaborative bibliographic tool out there? (Maybe I should poke around and see if CiteULike or Connotea provide that capability...)
At UM, we get free access to RefWorks (http://www.refworks.com/), which is essentially a web version of EndNote. Since we get free access through the University, we can create multiple accounts. Under that setup, you can create an account and then share that username/password with others. It's pretty clunky but that might have what you're looking for . . . especially if RIT already has a campus-wide license.
I don't think it affords you the ability to give anyone read rights to that bibliography, though.
(Maybe I should poke around and see if CiteULike or Connotea provide that capability...)
You can certainly get very close to this in Connotea using a combination of the groups, tags and privacy features.
In summary, you would do the following:
* Create a user group and add the usernames of all your collaborators to it.
* All the references posted by any members of that group would then be collected together
* If you need privacy, you can choose to make references visible to just other members of the group
* Agree on a set of tags that would define your collaborative collection
* You can then view/export just the refs posted by members of the group using those tags as necessary.
I'd also be happy to discuss what other features we should add to Connotea to better meet your requirements.