Yoursci.com is a Science 2.0 project along the lines of OpenWetWare, but with a little tighter focus. They’ve got a section for contributing a project, and protocol section, and what I particularly like, a negative data section.
Content contribution and tool making kinda trade off one another, but all too often the cycle breaks not because the tool isn’t functional, but because it’s ugly. YourSci.com is pretty, looks functional, and it just so happens that I have some information they’re looking for.
In order for these things to be ‘good’ they need ‘content’. Its hard since there are so many wiki services out there, and so little people willing to take the time to contribute to them. I know I could never bother. Heck, I could hardly hold on to my attention long enough to post this reply.
It’ll just take some time, that’s all. I mean, eventually the idea of keeping your protocols in a Word document and distributing via Zip disks will seem as silly to everybody as it does to me today.
These things will be slow to catch on, because unlike Facebook, there’s not hordes of scientists following the cool kids around, but it’ll happen. I’m not saying I’m one of the cool kids, but just look at the rapid adoption of the BPR3 icon for lit review posts at scienceblogs.com. It’s not the best solution, not the easiest, but it caught on because a couple high-profile blogs starting using it, it was visually understandable, and it seemed to fulfill a need. The important point to notice is that most people are just inlining the image, because the database isn’t ready yet, so they’re not really getting anything out of it, but they’re doing it because it seems like something they should do.
I think most people are just waiting for the winner to emerge before they jump on board. Early adopters get to claim their namespace, and get some increased visibility if the horse they’re backing ends up winning, but they don’t get the immediate network benefits that you get when joining a well-established service. I think Connotea is a early example of this. I’ve been using it to bookmark papers for over a year now, and the similar users function has only just started to become useful. Someone importing their library now could get useful recommendations immediately. Interestingly, I’ve been wondering who nanog is for forever because he was my one good recommendation for months and months. He just found me on Nature Network.