• http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/2007/04/social_scholarship_on_the_rise.html

In a posting entitled "Social Scholarship on the Rise," academic librarian Laura Cohen outlines a series of scholarly practices that would take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to make the processes of research and writing more public, more interactive, more collaborative, and more...well...social. Cohen's idealized portrait of the practice of social scholarship--from conceptualization to publication--is coherent and compelling.

Perhaps we can take the increased prominence of web-based document-sharing spaces as an independent indication that Cohen is onto something. The web services SlideShare and Scribd, for example, are dedicated respectively to the sharing of slide presentations and written documents, two genres at the heart of scholarly production. What's more, web-based productivity suites such as Zoho and ThinkFree seem to be putting more effort into creating spaces for users to share their content. As Zoho explained in a recent blog posting:

Previously, presentations declared public in Zoho Show were used mainly for embedding them in blogs or say the public URL was mailed across for friends/colleagues to see. Zoho Show lacked a place where such presentations were exhibited for the whole user community to contribute to & make use of. Not anymore! Click here & you will see all the presentations made public till now. You can see that each presentation has a separate page where you can comment on, get the code for embedding it in your blog/web site, the number of views it has got till now, related presentations based on tags/author, 'digg it' & 'Add to delicious' icons etc.

ThinkFree Docs, meanwhile, is the bigger and better reincarnation of that company's earlier Doc Exchange. Described in one company blog posting as "a sort of Flickr for office documents," ThinkFree Docs covers documents, spreadsheets and slide shows all in one.

Whatever other difficulties the social scholar might confront, she will not lack for document sharing venues.