Communication between people who would never otherwise have met (or even heard of one another) is one of the things which the internet and world wide web can be very good at. Finding and developing the best ways to harness this is always a live issue, and one promising model was launched as a beta in July of 2007, and as a full live product at the end of the year, by publishers Elsevier. I’ve been using and exploring it since October (late in the beta phase), both through my own account and with the coöperation of other users willing to act as stalking horses.
In essence, 2collab is a networking site – like Facebook or Bibo for social life, LinkedIn for business reputation structures, Advogato and ITToolbox in the computing world, Friends Reunited and so on – but designed for researchers. Not necessarily science or computing researchers, but the material which each user sees is easily tailored. To quote the original announcement of the 2collab beta: 'The history of science is based on working together – it’s all about sharing and learning. And this is what 2collab is all about.' [read more]
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