Sulia

The World's first subject-based social network is how Sulia defines itself. I certainly wouldn't use quite such a description myself, but I have to say that it's a very useful and interesting site. It's what I would term a 'news aggregration source' since it finds information on over 1,000 subject specific channels, bringing you top stories and news. It filters out irrelevance and spam in real time, and dynamically ranks over 2 million sources every day.

It's a free resource and you log into it using your Facebook or Twitter credentials. If it's the first time that you've used it, Sulia will suggest some news channels for you - Election 2012, Sports, Tech and so on. Once you have made some choices it will then start to display stories for you to look at. This is my page for information on Social Media for example:

You get to see recent stories with brief summaries, and you can like them, comment on them, or share them on Facebook or Twitter. I personally found the story segments too large for my liking, and would prefer them much smaller so that it's easier to scroll through. Sulia also gives me the opportunity to follow specific individuals and creates a 'following' page so that I can drag subject stories and individuals together in one place.

Sulia also provides a 'leader board' of experts in particular subject areas, but it seems that you don't need to have joined it in order to be one of their experts. I guess this is where the 2 million plus trusted sources comes into play, as they may have decided that a particular blog is worthy of the accolade. I was slightly surprised to find myself listed, and my posts being curated, and it didn't take me very long to find other colleagues from Twitter on their list as well. I'm not quite sure how I have a 'global score' of 45 for the last week, but it seems that I have. That's not particularly good though, since I'm only ranked 341 in the list of experts in the library field, but I'm sure I'll get over it.

It's a good tool - it was pulling up lots of really interesting stories for me to look at, and I could easily spend a long time trawling through the site. However, what it really did scream at me was 'iPad' since it would be a much more enjoyable resource to use, and it's crying out for an app. On the other hand, if you don't have a tablet, this is a great resource that you can use to view information in a new form. I'm not sure that it's going to compete with Zite as my favourite tool in this area, since that's the one I prefer on the iPad. A similar tool is Pulse.Me which can also be read on the web as well as a tablet.

Sulia is certainly worth looking at though, and I'd encourage you to take a few moments to explore its functionality.

Comments

[Emma]

Looks interesting; and it seemed to be able to predict what I'd be interested in almost instantly from my twitter ID. (I don't think that EdTech would be top of the suggested list for most people!)
I wasn't so keen on the fact it said it might tweet for me; would rather it had said something along the lines "I'll tweet if you ask me to" ... which is what I *think* it meant, rather than *I'll send random tweets when I fancy it without checking with you first" ...