Comments on: Ethan Zuckerman's work toward a Serendipity Engine

By: I’ve joined Mendeley as Community Liaison. at Synthesis

I’ve joined Mendeley as Community Liaison. at Synthesis — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:04:17 +0000

[...] Subsequent papers and grant proposals were written using Connotea + Zotero, but as Zotero became more useable, Connotea became less. I attempted to share what I was learning about these new tools for doing and communicating science with my colleagues in the lab who were having the same issues and solving them in their own ways, but the activation energy to get them going with Connotea2 was too high for something that was still missing that bit of UI polish a mass appeal app needs. Citeulike just had too embarrassing of a name for me to recommend. 2collab was an interesting development, but wasn’t quite good enough for me to switch from Connotea. Less people used it and it wasn’t becoming part of the ecosystem like Connotea and Citeulike. The missing link was still integration with Word, because while Zotero’s word integration became better, the moving of information from the online services to Zotero was fraught with difficulty. A particular problem was that although these programs had been designed with tagging specifically in mind, the data exchange formats(.ris) were from the pre-tagging era and there wasn’t agreement on in which field tags should be put/found. Where URLs should be stored was another issue. Connotea had an API, but none of the other citation managers used it. My efforts dealing with this can be seen in the comments below my post on Connotea. Because by this point I had drunk deeply of the Semantic Web Big Data Open Access Collaborative Filtering Kool-aid, served in large glasses by the likes of Deepak, Peter Suber, Cameron Neylon, and JC Bradley, I was no longer content with online bookmarking of stuff; I wanted a dataset that I could do something with. I wanted recommendations and discovery and cool visualizations. I wanted serendipity. [...]

By: Should we hang out with people we don’t like « MobBlog

Should we hang out with people we don’t like « MobBlog — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:45:08 +0000

[...] Someone is already at work: Ethan Zuckerman’s work toward a Serendipity Engine [...]

By: Ida

Ida — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:46:45 +0000

Hi anniem. I’ve let the department chair know that there’s interest up at Columbia to know about CDT events. Tonight, Eli Kuslansky is speaking. 7pm, Keller Auditorium, 66 Fifth Ave.

By: anniem

anniem — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:07:48 +0000

I’m a doctoral fellow at Columbia TC. Our program shares many of your personal and academic foci. Unfortunately, there are very few shared resources between us and we had no notice of this event. I would have loved to attend. Please consider connecting with me and we can reach out to each other for future events and resources!

By: Ilkka Kakko

Ilkka Kakko — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:42:03 +0000

Please, check our Facebook group “Serendipity Management” for further discussions:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=6655331989

By: …My heart’s in Accra » links for 2008-11-20

…My heart’s in Accra » links for 2008-11-20 — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:05:23 +0000

[...] Ethan Zuckerman%u2019s work toward a Serendipity Engine Ida C. Benedetto Kind review of a talk I gave in NYC recently, by an extremely sharp blogger who asked some of the best questions I've fielded recently. Nice analysis of the problems with the idea of architecting or institutionalizing serendipity (tags: serendipity xenophilia homophily mine) [...]