ScienceStage

ScienceStage was a global, science-oriented multimedia portal that specialized in online video streaming to support communication between scientists, scholars, researchers in industry, and professionals. It was also used by academics and students as a virtual educational tool. Video content ranged from conference recordings, to interviews, documentaries, webinars, and tutorials. ScienceStage also functioned as a 'hub' by creating a meta-layer to enable the networking of both users (individuals and groups) and content (video, audio, and documents), to form an integrated multimedia and social networking platform for scientists.
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By creating "Stages" and groups and by uploading content, users could communicate their ideas in a broad network and participate within and across discourses of the global scientific community. ScienceStage thus functioned as a communication platform to serve the advancement of the sciences. Users could also bookmark content they found useful or interesting and create their own media library and playlists for video and audio streaming. Other online communication tools included messaging, blogs, and setting up online video conferences to discuss projects or conduct tutorials. Users could monitor the quality of content posted by other users by posting comments and rating specific content. Through the website, one might also access external online scientific databases, for example, PubMed, the IEEE, and CiteSeer.
Networking
Stages
As users, individuals and organizations created public profiles, called "Stages." By uploading content to their Stage, users could publicly present their research, academic institution, or their company.<ref nameanalytik/> Uploaded content could then be linked to similar content across all media types (video, audio, documents) as well as relevant Stages and groups.<ref nameharvard/>
Groups
When users shared similar interests or expertise, they could join or form a group. A group was often created in order to discuss a particular topic or to collaborate on a specific project.<ref name=harvard/> Unlike a Stage, groups might be either public or private. They could consist of as few as two members who wish to privately share content, to many members who wish to make public their collaborative efforts. For example, if a scientist in Germany has published a paper on landmark-identification using eye-movement tracking, she could upload this paper to her Stage. Once uploaded, the document could be linked to a video posted by a researcher in the U.S. in the same virtual group, and both of these could be subsequently linked to a company or university lab developing new eye-tracking technology presented on its Stage.

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