Carmun

Carmun is a wonderful service (where I am a founder/investor) with alot of potential. Call it social networking for brainiacs, the yin to the Facebook yang, whatever . . . but its goal is to create an online community for college and grad students by making the task of doing academic work easier. A nice social purpose, with a profit motive of course.

Cesar Brea wrote a nice post about Carmun, wherein he wrote:

Carmun is (my words) "social citation search", principally for academics,
but also for anyone trying to find (good) books or journal articles on a
topic (like school kids and college students).

Carmun helps you find good materials on your subject by crawling the Library of Congress index, and parsing out citations from footnotes and bibliographies into a structured data format (is there an RSS extension that makes sense here?). Search is "social" in that it relies on ratings by users to help filter results.

Nice description. Thanks Cesar.

I'm starting to see more rich services and applications that can loosely be defined as part of a new education/web services ecosystem, such as LibriVox, Microsoft's Live Search Books, NotePods and Shakespeare Searched.