Connotea is closing

Connotea, nature.com’s social bookmarking site, is closing on March 12th, 2013.
Bad News? I don’t think so, because there are a lot of bookmarking tools, and the world of the internet is changing rapidly.
So: in the beginning you simply bookmarked inside your browser. AFAIK you can still do that with most browsers, but who cares. Then Social Bookmarking came into existence: Delicious was the thing. My account still works, but it is only kept up-to-date automatically via Diigo, and from there I sync (once in a year or so) with Evernote. I’ve got seven followers at Delicious, but if Delicious decides to shut down, I probably even will not notice it, unless, of course they’ll send me a notification.
For my more scientific bookmarking and reading I use CiteULike and Mendeley. And of course Connotea, because I always try everything there is on the Web. Mendeley has a desktop tool, an app for my tablet and talks to CUL. CUL syncs with Delicious; the problem is that Connotea, “developed for clinicians and scientists”, chose to reduce noise by not syncing with Delicious (and other bookmarking sites). There is a way to synchronize with CUL, but there were simply too many mouse-clicks needed to do that. The internet is fast and Information Overload – is there is such a thing like that – is part of the game.

I just exported my Connotea bookmarks to Diigo: there were only five, four of them already in my CUL and Mendeley library, the one that wasn’t, was a paid article (> $30!) that I won’t ever read.

So, I regret to say, I won’t miss it.

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  • The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge

    Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

    – David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993

  • Geek Attitude

    The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
    Definitely the only way to travel.
    Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.