Blue Insights unveils prototype platform for 'Social Discovery'

At the SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) conference in Boston the other week, I had the opportunity to catch up with Sharon Mombrú and Ammy Vogtlander of Blue Insights. They showed me a prototype of a new platform they’re developing that promises to bring together the functions of social networking sites with information sharing and organising services, for their newly-coined term 'social discovery'.

Societies will be able to use Blue Insights’ (as yet unnamed) platform to create a space for readers to store and selectively share documents with any number of self-created contact groups (networks). The Society also gets to promote their published content by making it as accessible as possible.

There will be some concern from publishers about the copyright implications of making articles so 'sharable' but sharing is simply a form of peer recommendation (like verbal, email) and content owners shouldn’t overlook the opportunity to leverage these endorsements as another form of promotion and distribution. Yes, a new way of thinking about business models will be required but it’s about time!