Social Networking - everybody's doing it
The CIA announced last week that it was to launch A-Space, the social networking site for spies! It seems that these kind of ‘targeted’ social networking sites are appearing all over the place. As long as there aren’t too many ones for research this can only be a good thing for ResearchPages.
One of the problems with selling RP to researchers is that the best way to quickly get across what it does – “it’s a social networking site, sort of like FaceBook” – tends to make people assume it is rather banal and pointless. As the profile of ‘social networking’ as a powerful tool for all sorts of organisations grows, I hope the reputation of ResearchPages as a ground-breaking and fundamentally useful tool for researchers will grow, and more people will take it seriously.
28/08/07 16:56
Comments
- Ben Godfrey says
- Perhaps LinkedIn is a better example. People sign up there because they want to create business relationships.
- 28/08/07 17:27
- Martin Johnson says
- I agree that LinkedIn is much more akin to the kind of thing we're trying to do here. It's the media attention that the CIA site and similar new developments are getting which I think stands to benefit RP.
- 28/08/07 17:44
- Adrian Southern says
- Okay, okay okay... I think I am getting the message boys... although I am rather seeing this as Geekbook, I'm a total geek..ya! Figure I might be able to use this to support a project start up with the Tyndall Center, will be meeting with them next week... crazy thing is its to develop a sense of place tool kit for community involvement in environmental issues... rather innovative stuff, not unlike this... probably going down a wiki type format. I'm excited anyway.
- 10/09/07 21:40
- Martin Johnson says
- Adrian - see my latest blog post about integrating a wiki into ResearchPages!
- 11/09/07 9:05