Nature Publishing Group has created a science aggregator called Scintilla. The goal of Scintilla is to bring personalization to science.

Here’s a description from Nature’s blog Nascent-

Scintilla is an aggregator—of science weblogs, news stories and publication databases—but it works in a slightly different way from the existing online RSS readers that cover the whole internet. For a start, the sources are manually selected, and only related to science, so there shouldn’t be any trouble with spam when searching for stories. Also there’s no ‘unread items’ count, so you don’t have to feel like you have lots of reading to catch up on. Browse the site, add sources to your collection, and visit your ‘Read’ page on Scintilla whenever you’re looking for some juicy science stories to read.

The other important feature of Scintilla is ratings and recommendations. As you’re browsing through stories or papers, give them a quick rating: high if you think it’s interesting and you’d like to read more like this, low if it’s not your cup of tea. These ratings will be analysed alongside everyone else’s and used to recommend stories that you might like (if other people liked the same stories as you, you’ll hopefully like the other things they found interesting as well).

You can also manually recommend stories to other people: either to individual members of your social network, or to groups that you’ve joined. There are already groups for bioinformatics, pop science, images, visualisation and open science, but if your speciality isn’t covered then feel free to start up a group and invite your colleagues to join. The more interesting people in your network, the better your recommendations will be

I haven’t had an opportunity to take a close look at the service, but I like the concept. The true utility of the aggregator will ultimately determine whether or not scientists choose to use the service. The scientific community isn’t nearly as web-addicted as IT folks (for obvious reasons) so I don’t think it’s a given that the scientifically-inclined will adopt the numerous web services Nature is rolling out lately. However, I do think it’s high time that someone gave it a shot.

Additional reading:
Scintilla brings personalization to science

Scintilla, a science aggregator and recommendation engine freshly from the Natureplex