Networking aims beyond facebooks

In the online social-networking world, Lexington start-up Carmun.com stands out like a guy wearing a pocket protector at the prom.

Carmun fuses social networking and the card catalog to create a free online space where people can dish on the hottest sources for their latest 20-page term paper, in place of the latest Lindsay Lohan gossip.

"We want to harness the collective wisdom of students all over the world," said Jonathan Edson , a former AOL executive who quit pursuing a PhD in medieval Irish and Welsh literature at Harvard University in order to create the website.

On Carmun, which went online in March, users set up profiles that are a toned down version of what appears on popular social-networking websites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com, with some basic information and a photo.

Then, they join or start groups related to their academic interests, such as Brain and Neuroscience, or Celtic Studies. They can also use Carmun as a database for their projects -- tagging, bookmarking, and rating the resources they use, and then sharing their projects with others if they choose.

The website lures users in with the promise of convenience -- it can automatically turn a journal article or source into a correctly formatted bibliography entry. Then, Edson hopes students will stick around, form groups, post their own bibliographies, and add to the community -- as well as click on the ads that will support the website.

Already, the site has attracted 80,000 unique visitors in its beta version, and 4,500 people have set up profiles, he said in an interview last week.

But it's an open question whether a network of citations will succeed in an online world that has been dominated thus far by flashy, exhibitionist Web pages.

Although the website does not yet allow people to post their papers, that is in the long-term plans, Edson said -- which means the site could eventually become a forum for plagiarism. Anyone working on a paper on Japanese pop culture, for instance, might tap into the group there.

Beyond that basic concern, there is also the question of whether collective knowledge is the best way to rate academic sources. Furthermore, social networks where college students already hang out, such as Facebook.com, allow people to create specialized groups around their interests.

But hanging over it all is the broader question of whether social networking can make it as a business. Presently, "next to none" of the proliferating number of social networking sites are profitable yet, said Jennifer Simpson, analyst at Yankee Group.

But A. David Lewis , a graduate student at Boston University who focuses on religion and literature, said that he has used the website to find sources he did not know existed.

Lewis said he thought the website's potential lay in emulating the success MySpace has had in becoming a place for people to discover new music.

So, instead of turning people on to new bands, Carmun will point its users to little-known but must-have treatises on niche topics.

For instance, someone with an interest in neo-Victorian novels may never have heard of an essay called "The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel," but can find out that it is "Long; interesting, but long," and has been rated four out of five stars, according to one reviewer.

Like any social network, Carmun will depend on the quality of the network of people who are willing to go online, hang out, and create their own content, Simpson said.

"It's great to have a social academic sphere where people can rate a piece of academic literature to say how good they thought it was," she said.

"But you have to make sure [people in] your social network -- in this case -- are pretty darn smart."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.