One of the strongest tendencies in the Internet is tagging. It consists of a method of classification that allows the users to identify files trough key words and then share this knowledge with the rest of net users. In no long, a huge base of knowledge is built, classified not by machines but by the intelligence of thousands of people. The first application to use this method intensively was Del.Icio.Us, but today there are many excellent examples of tagging that go beyond social bookmarks, such as Flickr.

Within the academic world, two sites are intensively using tagging as a method to build databases related to different disciplines. The first one is CiteULike, in which users can store the url of academic papers and documents found in the Internet for later easy finding. There’s a huge number of registers and the search by key word gives an interesting number of results. There’s also an interesting functionality: the possibility to export registers to Bibtex or Endnote format, used to generate bibliography databases and relatively common among the academics.

One of the inconvenients is that many of stored papers belong to pay-to-access magazines. Of course, if you’re logging in from an american college that pays for the service this is not an inconvenience, but from this side of the world it is an important access barrier. The restricted access of this academic publications is seriously affecting the impact and circulation of ideas within the academic circle. They’re making money, of course, but -I ask myself- at what future cost?

An example of the functioning of CiteULike can be seen at this site, which reunites contributions to the tag tourism. You can find more here: turismo; travel.

Another site is Connotea. Visually less attractive, it has the same functioning method of CiteULike: users classify contents trough key words, that help to reunite the contents on specific pages. At least for now, it has a lot less in content than its competitor, as you can see in the tags tourism and travel. Also, it has less academic articles and it lacks the export to Bibtex or EndNote function.

In both cases, they give us RSS feeds for every one of the tags generated. If you’re interested in adding them to your RSS clients, such as Bloglines or Feedreader, here go the URLs:

Connotea Travel Tag
Connotea Tourism Tag
CiteULike Travel Tag
CiteULike Viajes Tag
CiteULike Tourism Tag

By the way, both services provide bookmarklets that can be placed at the personal bar of Firefox, Opera or at Internet Explorer links. This way, we can save an address into a paper with just a click.