BibSonomy.org - Sharing Bookmarks and Bibliographies

Bibsonomy is making a bid in the social bookmarking arena. Already a very crowded market, but what's another site, if not another choice for you to indulge in. As with other bookmarking sites BibSonomy offers a bookmarklet which you can easily drop into your toolbar so you can bookmark pages as you surf the web. They also employ tags for organization—check out the tag cloud on right side of the homepage. Bookmarks can be made public, private or shared only amongst friends. So far, pretty similar to every other bookmarking site, right? But Bibsonomy also allows for the bookmarking of publications. Users can input and export Bibtex, Endnote, SWRC, DocBook and other bibliographic information directly from the site. Another interesting feature is the relations link which displays the existing relations within Bibsonomy's network; for instance, grouped under the headline computer, you'll find linux and Mac. Additionally, public bookmarks may be copied directly to your list (just hit copy), and you may also pick BibTex entries and download them as either BibTex or Endnote (once they're picked, they'll be sent to your basket, where you can choose to download them all, or a just a select few). While perhaps more involved than other sites, Bibsonomy is ideal for students especially during those mid and end of term crunches when papers, citations and all must be cranked out with alarming velocity. Bibsonomy's free for everyone.

"BibSonomy is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. When discovering a bookmark or a publication on the web, you can store it on our server. You can add tags to your entry to retrieve it more easily. This is very similar to the bookmarks/favorites that you store within your browser. The advantage of BibSonomy is that you can access your data from whereever you are. Furthermore, you can discover more bookmarks and publications from your friends and other people."

This German site is a gem for researchers, students and academics. The Endnote and Bibtex incorporation go beyond most other social bookmarking capabilities. Creating a bibliography is definitely not how you would want to spend your Saturday evening, however, Bibsonomy has come up with a more coherent and efficient way to get your resources together. It's pretty sophisticated and it works.

Is this too niche? Will the academic bent scare off mainstream users? Is it too complicated for most users?