People sometimes ask me how I have access to so much great stuff.   Well, I am somewhat plugged in to other people who find good stuff, like Andrea Kuszewski and Guy Kawasaki on Twitter for things I might otherwise never notice, but for science I have always used ScienceURLs.com

As I have discussed in the past, it is often the case that tools are built out of selfishness.   Science 2.0 was built, yes, as a way to give scientists a platform to provide content directly to the audience, but also because I didn't want to bounce around to 40 sites to find the best writers, so it was easier on me to put them all under one roof.   After Science 2.0 got popular, ScienceCodex was created to handle the volume of press releases and requests for coverage from outside people and then ScienceURLs.com was built so I could see what people were talking about.

Unlike ScienceCodex, which has become a top science site in its own right, ScienceURLs was just for me - it was basically a page containing all the newsfeeds I liked to check out.   My thinking was that if the concept took off someone would do it better (even the name is an homage to PopURLs, which does that for general stuff) but that never happened and along the way, despite it looking like homework, ScienceURLs started to get popular too.

So instead of being a tool 'just for me' we have made it a customizable page for everyone.   Thus, we upgraded it to make it more general purpose and now:

1) It has the most popular science sites built in by default but;

2) You can add or delete them.   So if you want to build your own custom science page, just add the rss feed into the toolbar and it makes its own block and;

3) You can move the blocks anywhere you want on the page.   So if Time doesn't update frequently enough for you but ScienceCodex does, you can move that to the top of your page, or anywhere else and;

4) All of that is done without you needing to create any account, which separates it from other sites that want to be customizable.  It uses a cookie to store your preferences (so you have to allow a cookie from that site) but even that expires if you don't come back for two weeks.    Basically, it is a low-hassle, low-footprint piece of science awesomeness for the science audience.

It's been up since last night, traffic there is already 3X of what it usually is for a whole day, and it is getting acclaim from other sites like ...



... so if you are a science junkie too, check it out.