How a Radio Web Site Has Shaken Up the Science World

Here's a strange-but-true admission from someone tapped to write science and technology news items: I'm not exactly gadget guy. I'm not sure that I deserve to forever walk around with a scarlet "L" (for Luddite) emblazoned on my garb, but I have to characterize myself as a not-so-early adopter.

Example: only within the last couple years have I discovered the power and beauty of streaming media, especially as it relates to music. Pandora and iTunes radio now figure prominently in my experience as an attentive music listener.

Another personal favorite is the British radio site last.fm, an online environment that allows listeners to start with a favorite song or band, springboard from there to learning about similar artists, and perhaps more importantly to connect with other users with similar tastes and to pick up additional bits of musical knowledge through interacting with them.

It's an incredibly cool site, and according to the latest news, its coolness factor is currently reaching beyond the tunes and heading straight for the test tubes.

The way in which the last.fm programmers constructed the site's functionalities has grabbed the attention of the science world, and its coding and algorithms are now being applied to a research application that will foster quicker connections among scientific researchers across myriad disciplines.

As reported in a Victor Keegan article in The Guardian, the online tool Mendeley.com provides a virtual meeting place for researches and their works. Arising through direct application of the keyword search methodologies employed in the building of last.fm, Mendeley takes the long waiting time required by traditional journal publishing out of the equation. Users who upload their papers -- and there are currently 4 million of them in the database -- can get immediate information on related research, how many users are reading their papers, and how many are viewing it favorably and recommending their work to other users.

The ability to get immediate information such as how many people have read a given article, if and how much they liked it, the extent to which it's being cited by other researchers, and to learn of and connect to others doing related work is so far beyond what the hard-copy technical journal realm can offer, it's no wonder that Mendeley is growing at a sprightly clip and raising lots of eyebrows in the scientific world.

Photo courtesy of Vmenkov, via Wikimedia Commons