On 05.03.2009, at 16:07, Michael McCracken wrote:
The startup is called mendeley.com, and is apparently associated with
last.fm somehow (through funding maybe)
They have a cross-platform (QT I think) reference manager that uses a
SQLite backend and syncs with a web site that has social aspects,
including anonymized stats gathering about people's papers ratings,
etc.
This is interesting. I really like the idea of using the internet to
make finding, commenting on, and updating research publications
easier, and it's just as important to be able to keep some section of
your data private (I think they let you do this.) and local for use in
generating publications.
Also, they've announced a deal to sync with citeulike:
http://www.mendeley.com/blog/2009/02/citeulike-and-mendeley-collaborate/
That's particularly interesting, as it's possible they'd open up an
API for other clients. Since I didn't see any OS X screenshots of
their app, I can't say for sure but I have my prejudices about
cross-platform UI design...
Certainly an interesting project, but it seems to be a curse of all
newly released bibliographic apps, that they offer much too limited
entry types, at least for everyone who is not in English speaking hard
sciences (I just say 'bookauthor' … ).
What is interesting is that they use, like Zotero, CSL for formatting.
CSL (Citation Style Language) is an open language (open as in the
specs are available to everyone) for formatting citations which has
been designed with much attention for the areas traditional formats
fail to address (humanities, internationalisation, portability etc).
At the moment, Mendeley's CSL integration is not so obvious, but I
guess we will soon be able to use the many CSL styles that already
exist for Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/styles ).
Talking about Zotero: Not only has version 1.5beta been recently
released which offers syncing among multiple clients, they also offer
web access to your data. This is still a bit rudimentary, but it works
and is geared in a similar direction like Zotero.
BTW, the UI of Mendely's OSX is ok. It wont win a beauty price, but
there's also nothing fundamentally wrong or ugly.
Simon
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