Comments on: Mendeley’s PR machine and more

By: bill

bill — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:54:19 +0000

I find it very counter-intuitive, and on top of that I could never get it to work properly. It seemed to be full of horrible bugs — unable to add tags to some items, freezing up my browser at random intervals, and so on.

I keep hearing good things about it, though, so maybe I should try again with the latest versions of Zotero and FF…

By: Paulo Nuin

Paulo Nuin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:35:56 +0000

Why don’t you like Zotero, Bill? I know it’s not perfect, but it works pretty well for me.

By: bill

bill — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:31:23 +0000

I want to see Mendeley succeed, but I think they may be doing themselves harm with all the PR. If they don’t deliver a pretty amazing product pretty soon, they could face a serious backlash.

Have to disagree about Zotero, btw. I think it sucks ass. Connotea has become Buggotea pretty much full-time, so for me that just leaves CiteULike, which is not perfect either. I plan to just check in with Martin Fenner every few months, to see if he’s discovered the perfect ref manager yet.

By: Paulo Nuin

Paulo Nuin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:01:53 +0000

In my view there’s no small people on the interwebs, every opinion counts, especially when they are well formulated and based in some undeniable principle. But the big-shots usually don’t go against the flow, they are part of the flow, and the flow is what makes them big-shots. They will go against bigger causes, but they will never sail on muddied creeks, because they don’t want have their white and pure mantles dirty. The small problems get solved by themselves, and one day everyone will wake up and will have Mendeley running in the cloud and all problems of reference management and science will be a thing of the past, no more controversies. That’s what the PR machine tells us, that’s what we need to do.

As a contrast, we have Papers, which is a great application, created by wonderful people with a great background story. Unfortunately they are a Mac-only shop, but that doesn’t make them less relevant.

[In no shape of form this is a critic to Deepak. He's one the online presences that I still like and respect. I don't think he's among the ones that shy away from controversies.]

By: Abhishek Tiwari

Abhishek Tiwari — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:36:33 +0000

I could not agree more, what really surprise me is the effectiveness of Mendeley’s PR machinery. Even People like Michael Nielsen, Deepak Singh have peen part of this for whatever reasons. To me Mendeley’s PR machinery have been always arrogant and I commented it several time unfortunately people never took it seriously cause I am not so called big guy of social media of science. I hope the concerns you have raised here will be taken seriously by the community especially when we are on a forum like The Life Scientist which is turning into PR machinery workspace.