Since the reason for the variable degree of success of online social tools for scientists is largely attributed to the lack of participation, I think a great way to pull in participation by scientists would be to offer that kind of value up-front. You give it a paper or set of papers, and it tells you the ones you need to read next, or perhaps the ones you’ve missed. My crazy idea was that a recommendation system for the scientific literature, using expert-scored literature to find relevant related papers, could do for papers what Flickr has done for photos.
JISC funded project which aims to provide generic services to support on-line consultation and brainstorming in distributed communities of practice, using social software.
Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook: an investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook’ paper by Neil Selwyn, London Knowledge Lab. Paper presented at the ‘Poke 1.0 - a Facebook social research symposium’, London Knowledge Lab, University of London, UK - Thursday 15th November 2007