Scintilla is a new information filtering and personalisation site for scientists. To provide readers with useful, interesting and stimulating information we're including freely-accessible content from as many of the best science bloggers and news sources as possible.
To do this we're aggregating content from RSS/Atom feeds. We would like to assure you that items shown on Scintilla will always be credited to the original site, there'll always be a link back to the item on the original site and if you ever want us to remove your content from our servers then we'll be happy to oblige, though we hope you'll be pleased by the increased readership.
Here's a brief overview of how the site works:
First, readers tell Scintilla which topics and sources they're interested in. For example, the latest news from NASA; anything from PubMed with 'glycomics' in the title; weblog posts about cephalopods; and so on.
From then on, when the reader visits Scintilla they'll see fresh, relevant content matching their interests.
There's also a social aspect to the site: you can form groups around particular topics, add colleagues to your social network, mark the items you find interesting and recommend items to other people and groups.
On the technical side of things, we'll only be showing content that's already available in a site's RSS/Atom feed. If the site only provides an excerpt in the feed (though the full item is preferable, as it means the post is more likely to show up in saved searches), readers will click through to the site to read the full content. We won't be providing any commenting functions, so all discussion around an item will still happen on the original site, where it belongs.
In case anyone's worried about losing advertising revenue, there's a solution to that too (more details will be available soon). In your user profile on Scintilla, you can claim a blog as your own and enter an Google AdSense ID. From then on, whenever an item from your site is displayed on Scintilla, AdSense ads displayed alongside the item will use your AdSense ID, so click-throughs will be credited to your account, just as if they were displayed on your own site.
We hope you find Scintilla useful: please feel free to have a look around. If you have any suggestions for features, any concerns, or find any problems, please do let us know.