Anderson's comments on the Long Tail and social networks are especially on-target, and relevant to the sciences.

A recent D-F article discussed the potential for online videos in chemical research. Although chemistry has been slow to catch on, biologists have been busy creating phenomenal video content. One of the best efforts in this space is the Journal of Visualized Experiements (JoVE).

YouTube videos spread so quickly in part because of their ability to be embedded into other Websites. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. The reason is simple: when you embed someone else's content in your own, you create something fundamentally new.

Although JoVE doesn't yet support public video embedding, it's a feature under active development. Nikita Bernstein, co-founder and editor of JoVE, was kind enough to provide me with an early preview of JoVE video embedding. You see the result displayed at the top of this article. Videos can be embedded both in a vertical format, as is done here, or a horizontal format.

Now, if you're a chemists, injecting mosquitoes may not be your thing. But just think about all of the procedures you've done that used an unfamiliar apparatus, produced an unusual color, called for a difficult crystallization, foamed, became too viscous to stir or filter, or used an uncommon technique. Think of all of the details essential to reproducibility that get left out of a written description. Then think of all of the dirty jobs that are carried on by oral tradition: maintaining a dry box; dealing with flammable spent catalyst; cleaning a solvent still; quenching butyllithium.

Video certainly won't be useful in documenting every part of chemistry, but there are vast swaths of unexplored territory, such as experimentals, where it could change the game significantly.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million. ScienceHack offers a service that helps users find free videos in a variety of scientific fields, including chemistry.

Perhaps more noteworthy than the service itself is how ScienceHack works. Rather than relying on robotic indexing agents, ScienceHack claims to use real scientists to screen its links to videos.

Given the wealth of free chemical information sources appearing in a variety of formats, from blogs to videos to databases, could the ScienceHack model of expert-selected scientific information be the start of a new trend in scientific Internet startups?

Currently, ScienceHack's links point to mostly standard general chemistry demonstrations found on YouTube and Google Video. This could get considerably more interesting if research chemists begin to experiment more with video as a medium for communicating results. Regardless, ScienceHack demonstrates the value of indexing free stuff in science.