• http://mashable.com/2007/10/10/carmun-relaunch/

Kristen Nicole (on Mashable) calls our attention to the relaunch of carmun, an academic, social networking, bibliographic, research space geared primarily at students, but also open to graduate students and faculty. Nicole describes it as "kind of like what Facebook meant to be until kids at frat parties learned the ease with which photos can be posted and shared." Carmun offers social bookmarking, study groups, social networking according to subject of interest, bibliographic reference management, and a research engine that will try look up any resources you identify at your own library. The list of university libraries at which it works is fairly long, and the way that carmun provides and promotes this functionality is a nice antidote to Facebook's apparent reluctance to let librarians build search applications for the Facebook platform.

Among other things, carmun is building a collaborative, user powered subject research guide. The pickings can be sparse, especially in less popular subjects, but the idea is very promising. Professional scholars and librarians could certainly benefit from a similar constellation of tools. Many of the components are already independently available, but rolling them into one space would be extremely practical. In-house, single-author research guides and live help services are costly to create and maintain. Social research guides can transcend the idiosyncratic strengths of individual institutions. Tie-ins to local databases can lend global resources immediate relevance. The trick, as always, is figuring out how to integrate authoritative expertise with broad collaboration and user-generated input.

P.S. Don't miss the very funny promotional video Nicole points to.