opinion

For many years, people accumulate personal collections of academic publications of interest in paper form. As such collections grow with time, more file cabinets and book shelves are needed for storage. First, space becomes a problem. Second, finding a specific paper could be a headache, even if the collections are well categorized.

As more and more publications become available online in recent years, people gradually switch to collect electronic versions, e.g. PDF files of papers. These files are often stored in local hard drives. Space is not an issue anymore. But again, locating a paper from hundreds of files in tens of folders still might be a heck of efforts.

Besides the difficulty in searching, other common shortcomings include:

• Locally stored, limited access flexibility.
• Personally owned, not easy to share with other people. As a result, the scale of personal collections is often limited.
• Redundently collected. Consider this: a same gem paper is manually archived by thousands of people individually.
• Statically and passively maintained. Lack of interactions among people sharing common interests.

Any better idea? Here comes Web2.0, which is all about online collaboration. Among the numerous tools enabled by Web2.0, CiteULike could be the one able to solve the above issues for us. A previous post in AMN explored the possibility to form online journal club based on CiteULike. Here is an example.

(Originally posted on Applied Mechanics News on 25 February 2006)

(Originally posted on Applied Mecahnics News on 11 March 2006)

A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine shows a boy asking his dad a question. The dad, reading a book, replies, “Go ask your search engine.” The cartoon was published in Feb. 2000, three months before Google officially became the world's largest search engine with its introduction of a billion-page index — the first time so much of the web's content was made searchable. If the boy asks again today, his dad will say, “Go ask Google.”

At $6 billion a year in revenue and $7.6 billion in cash, Google is a success. What’s more important to the rest of us, Google is running its business in a way that may change the world. Through its never-about-average products (i.e., Google search, Google Earth (and Mars too), Google Map, and more recently, Writely), Google is radically redefining the ways we obtain, organize, use, store, and share information.

The ASME International Applied Mechanics Division has about 5000 members. The number is too large for us to know each other individually, but too small for CNN to cover us in the Situation Room.

Then came the Internet. We have since been in touch through emails, and looked up each other on the Web. Many web pages created in 1990s, however, are static. For such a web page, the bottleneck is often the webmaster. He or she gets a request each time anyone wants to post anything. It is more like a broadcast than a web.

In recent years, there have been waves of new internet phenomena, such as Wikipedia, Real Simple Syndicates (RSS), open-source movement, and web logs (blogs). They are collectively known as Web 2.0.