This post has been just edited & updated (February 3rd, 2009)

Long time no update!

Yep, we’ve been extremely busy lately - so busy, that we’ve actually neglected our little wePapers blog.
So to all of you who have been waiting for our next post, this one is for you.

Since we launched wePapers publicly, there have been lots of blogposts on us.
The sad truth is, we’ve learned that the blosphere is literally flooded with blog-post plagiarism and just sheer laziness (sorry, but copy-pasting a press release is called being a lazy blogger).
But what we also disovered was, that there’s also tons of great blogs and webmagazines devoted to doing their job and investing time and efforts in creating some great, worth-reading posts and articles. Bloggers who aren’t afraid of thorough research and of giving criticism. Whether they loved wePapers or hated it, we’d like to send our outmost respect to these bloggers and writers who love doing what they do and do it quite well.

We also got some attention from the printed press, and last but definitely not least - you guys.

So here’s what people have been saying about wePapers since we launched publicly, about two months ago:

February 03, 2009 - Ed 186

“Since Mr. Canfield teaches English here at John Carroll, he thought that wepapers.com would be very helpful for students to review each others papers.”

http://startupmeme.com/learn-for-free-at-wepapers/”

February 03, 2009 - Tech Aviv

“No more inane conversation about what the lecturer discusses that day, and no more need for smalltalk.”

http://www.techaviv.com/2009/02/02/mini-seedcamp-tlv/

January 31, 2009 - Stuff for Starving Students

“…it embodies the greatest features of the Web by creating a platform for anyone to teach and learn.”

http://stuffforstarvingstudents.umwblogs.org/2009/01/31/user-submission-cool-tools-for-school/

January 29, 2009 - Deccan Herald

“Their endeavor to create a paradigm shift in the way people can collaborate online to share knowledge, is indeed laudable.”

http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Jan292009/dheducation20090128115129.asp

January 28, 2009 - TagEdge

“…surprised me a lot with the amount and quality of papers available in its platform”

http://tagedge.com/2009/01/28/wepapers/

January 21, 2009 - Fastweb.it

“Thanks to its multiple applications, Wepapers seems destined to emerge from the long list of applications for organizing and sharing of information in the Network”  (translated from italian)

http://www.fastweb.it/portale/canali/digital/digitalife/contenuti/articolo/?id=FL01216

January 25, 2009 - Ace Startups

“WePapers is great social knowledge sharing website for students… Sites like this will make it easy to access information, old or new on any topic. Universities would do well to recommend this website to their students.”

http://www.acestartups.com/wepapers-studying-in-the-future/

January 21, 2009, Makeuseof

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/handy-tools-for-students/

January 14, 2009 - Frequently Asked Q

By Mike Qauissaunee, associate professor of Engineering and Technology at Brookdale Community College

“This will be pretty handy for my Dynamics class this semester. If our documents, our classes, virtually anything you can think of is going into the cloud, why not study groups. I love it!”

http://q-ontech.blogspot.com/2009/01/wepapers-taking-study-groups-into-cloud.html

January 5, 2009 - The Hindu
The Hindu is the third largest circulated English daily print newspaper in India.

“An advantage of this service is that one can access different types of academic materials from leading institutions…”

http://www.hindu.com/2009/01/05/stories/2009010552801400.htm

December 30, 2008 - Digital eLearning

“wePapers is where you find the kind of quality information you wouldn’t find anywhere else on the web”

http://www.digitalearning.net/wepapers/

December 29, 2008 - Education & Tech

“Forget About Google Docs and Scribd. wePapers Is Here and Rocks!”

http://www.miltonramirez.com/2008/12/forget-about-google-docs-and-scribd.html

December 26 - GearFire

“Here’s a tool to bookmark. Whether you just want to find a source for a paper, manage your school life, or study with a group, wePapers is a seriously useful tool… you may find you spend more and more time on the wePapers site, uploading and downloading all your course materials.”

http://www.gearfire.net/part-worldwide-study-group-wepapers/

November 19, 2008 - ZePy

“students everywhere will appreciate such an online database being available and accessible at no cost”

http://www.zepy.net/archives/the-world%E2%80%99s-biggest-study-group-in-wepaperscom.html

December 11, 2008 - EFL 2.0

“I’m going to email my groups and encourage them to start uploading resources in Spanish, English or any other language to wePapers.”

http://maberui.webs.upv.es/

December 5, 2008 - T in Tel Aviv

“wePapers is an ever growing archive of unpublished papers on a multitude of subjects… wePapers is now in Beta form but clearly there is no limit to how much information will be shared via the site. Let your research begin!”

http://www.tntelaviv.com/2008/12/wepapers-new-israeli-startup-new.html

November 30, 2008 - Rev2.org

“A glorious example of what the web can really be used for. Touting itself as “the world’s biggest study group,” wePapers is that, I’m sure. Name a subject (I picked one of my favorites: history) and delve in. I was on the site to review it for this article, but ended up browsing through it and reading in-depth studies for hours. The only thing that saved me was my inability to read on-screen information for more than a couple of hours without getting eye-aches. The site is that great. If you have time to spend reading real academic information on your favorite subject, then you’ll probably find yourself engrossed quickly. I guarantee you’ll bookmark it.”

http://www.rev2.org/2008/11/30/wepapers-expanding-your-knowledge-or-cheating/

November 28, 2008 - StartupMeme

“provides quality information through its papers, that you wouldn’t find anywhere else on the Web.”

http://startupmeme.com/learn-for-free-at-wepapers/

November 28, 2008 - Angela Maiers

“Great for research and collaboration.”

http://www.angelamaiers.com/2008/11/chalk-talk-112808.html

November 27, 2008 - Skidzopedia

“will help students and anyone seeking academic knowledge come together to share and upload academic material, discuss what they study and mainly – find tons of quality academic documents.”

http://www.skidzopedia.com/2008/11/27/wepapers-com-launched-aims-to-be-the-youtube-of-academic-papers-and-documents/

November 18, 2008 - Rotor blog

“Launching this week is wePapers, a Web site that operates like an online study group.  People from around the world can congregate to share class notes, discuss study guides and download term papers. “

http://www.rotorblog.com/2008/11/18/wepapers-aims-for-the-largest-study-group-ever/

But most important, what do you think?

There are many things, notions, ideals, ideas and people of have influenced us and propelled us to give birth to wePapers.

One of those is brilliant visionary Howard Rheingold’s amazing TED talk about collaboration (this talk is called “Way-New Collaboration”).
This is one of the most inspiring speeches about open source, open access and collaboration.

Take a look at this fantastic talk. Rheingold delivers a phenomenal presentation and talks about everything from Creative Commons to the Prisoner’s Dillema. Take a look at this. We hope you find it as captivating as we did.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5s3Z0iesRM&hl=en&fs=1]

So,
What do you think?

We’ve been open for about a week, and we really want to know what you think. Whether you love it or hate it, we’d really really like to know.
Any specific features you’d like to see? Anything that bugged you (a bug, perhaps?), let us know how we can improve ourselves. “Help us help you” like they say

Shoot us your thoughts here: http://wepapers.uservoice.com/

It took us a really long time, but guess what - wePapers has finally launched publicly today (Monday).
Could you believe it? Neither could we.

Check it out here - www.wepapers.com

Now you don’t even need a secret hush-hush password anymore to log in.

And now it’s your turn - we would really really appreciate your help (any help will do) - if you have any school papers lying around, why not upload them to wePapers and share with the world? You’d be surprised how much those school scraps you have in your “My Documents” folder could help another lost soul in whatever subject it is that you are/were studying.

Oh, and most important - we welcome all of our new visitors aboard.

So what’s new in the mean time? Well, besides hundreds (who are we kidding? Thousands!) of bug fixes and all kinds of optimizations, we’ve also added some really nifty features, like the MLA compliant citation/bibliography wonderfulness for each paper. Just click, copy & paste - we’ll saved you a lot of work for phrasing those citations in your next paper.

From now on we’ll keep you a little more updated on what’s going on around the wePapers website - now that things aren’t super-secret any more.

From time to time even we have to take a break from whatever it is we’re doing, and waste some time online on random timekillers.

Lately we’ve been thinking to ourselves, “We’ve bin keeling too manny brein sells.”

And it’s true. No, really - because the bitter truth is, watching videos of rap songs synchronized with Bert and Ernie clips is quite enjoyable, but wouldn’t make you a brain surgeon, let’s admit it.

So here are some time-killing links for you guys, smarty-pants style:

Caltech has a “near real-time simulation of Southern California seismic events portal” out there. Not bad if you want to learn more about those scary Californian earthquakes.

On the other hand, if you’re much into insects, the University of Florida has a cute website with lots of information about none other than singing insects.

Okay, we know this next one isn’t really academic (it’s not academic at all, actually), but it’s got links to websites that will teach you any important life skill, from selecting good vegetables and giving basic first aid to…. er, jump starting a car. You can basically say that it will teach you everything you would never learn in college.

And, you know, if you didn’t care too much for those links above, you can always enjoy yourself with a good classy time waster:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21OH0wlkfbc&hl=en&fs=1]

Hi everybody,

We’re working hard to get the public beta up and running already.

We have a few interesting links for you to quench your academic thirst, people.

Check out the live gallery of the Museum of Art and Arcaheology, of the University of Missouri-Columbia College of Arts &Science.

MIT has a really cool mobile experience laboratory. Check out their cool projects (and the lady from the Fiber Cloud video too…).

We know you can hardly contain yourself with the anticipation for our public beta release to immerse yourself in all that free academic knowledge of the world, but in the meantime check out what we think is one of the world’s largest voice libraries: the Vincent Voice Library of Michigan U.

See you soon, people. We have a lot of old papers to dust off until then.

It’s almost the end of July, we’re doing some bug fixing around the website.
We hope those of you who are participating in our private beta find it exciting, like we do.
We’re hoping to get to Seedcamp 2008 over at London in September - we’ll keep you updated, folks!

Can you believe it? We’re seriously almost finished! Let us know in the comments if and why you would like to be invited to the private beta.