It would be a place where people (students, junior faculty, etc) could learn the ropes of academia and science without the pain and misery that traditionally is required. The differences I can see from existing services is the focus on journal club-style discussions and maybe a low barrier to entry - Shirley Wu from twhirl

But obviously, whatever he ends up pursuing should learn from the trials and tribulations of the many related services out there (including services like FF, which is also discussion-oriented) - Shirley Wu from twhirl

It's easy to immediately discount any proposal that sounds like yet another facebook for scientists, but there are still some interesting and potentially good ideas out there. Unfortunately, people who aren't as familiar with the existence of these tools always think of facebook as the ideal and as a brand new idea if applied to the scientist community. Hopefully I convinced my co-worker otherwise, while still encouraging the more innovative aspects of the concept. <end rant> - Shirley Wu from twhirl

Thanks for doing that. - Mr. Gunn

AcaWiki is built around a very similar concept, and John Wilbanks makes an argument for bringing journal clubs online (cf. http://ff.im/airoV ). - Daniel Mietchen

Shirley, Besides AcaWiki (great place to have these discussions, but I'm biased! http://acawiki.org/ ) your colleague also might be interested in GradTurkey, a journal-club discussion wiki originally aimed at grad students: http://gradturkey.fastcoder.net/ - Jodi Schneider

can discussion on AcaWiki be linkable and embeddable for public like you can do on FF? If not, so why don't do journal club on FF? Can't get it - Alexey

I tried a site like this a few years ago. ResearchFire, or something like that? Never heard of it again. - Neil Saunders

my comments on the topic in 08/07 http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007... - Attila Csordas

Knol has many journal features built-in. Here is an example of a successful research journal on H1N1: http://knol.google.com/k... - Bill Strathearn

John Wilbanks mentioned doing journal clubs online in his talk here recently: http://bit.ly/3jxnxr - Walter Jessen

this topic came up during a discussion today with Mike Eisen of PLoS, re: why commenting hasn't really taken off - his thought is that people are more likely to comment if there's a central place to do it rather than individually at each journal website for each paper (how many of us access papers directly through journal websites except through PubMed anyway?). The whole time I was thinking of this idea. Eisen also mentioned that Pubmed is probably going to implement commenting or rating in some form "soon", which I'd be very interested to see! - Shirley Wu from twhirl

can somebody point to the platform for journal club online better then blog post? It's combine everything - presentation (ppt embedded from SlideShare or Gdocs, video embedded from YouTube/Vimeo...) presenter's opinion, discussion section under the post, embedded comments from FF, ranking of the presentation and number of views. Importantly you don't need to register or get account for commenting, it's public and linkable, moderatable . Whole world can participate. What can be better? - Alexey

@Neil Saunders Were you thinking of JournalFire? We recently updated the site and are looking for feedback. I posted about it yesterday: http://friendfeed.com/the-lif... - John Delacruz