CogBlogged Tagged ‘small pieces’

Just when we thought the net was full to the brim with social bookmark tools, comes another new kid on the block: RawSugar: RawSugar enables you to save and tag all your favorite web pages and then later find the one need in seconds. Why is this so important? Think of how many times you forgot the name of a restaurant, place or event you’re trying to remember and can’t locate the right web page with the information you need. Saving pages on the web with RawSugar means you can find them in seconds just by remembering a couple of key words. Perhaps your looking for a cafe in San Francisco. Just search for San Francisco cafes and RawSugar displays all the web pages tagged San Francisco and cafes. Looking through the list you’ll find the ones you’ve saved. With RawSugar you can easily save everything worth saving: travel destinations, [...]

It’s been interesting to see how a dis-connected set of blog posts about “distributed conversations” have pretty much emulated the topic. Mine was but one tiny ripple among the tide. With a few iterations of search (lacking an explanation of their syntax), Technorati does a credible job, but is it all the echoes? Just recently, Stephen Downes pointed to an iteresting, long thread on this topic inside the house of Moodle, the forums where Moodlers are trying to get their hands around fitting a blog tool. Take a gander in Blogs, Forums and the Nature of Discussion (you can read by logging in as guest). It seems like there is a village of people who dwell in tree houses, and spend all their time there. They sometimes see through their binoculars 1 or 2 people who live far away in the caves. The two societies rarely meet, yet they form [...]

Maybe some readers are all over RSS and massive amounts of syndication of content, but I am jazzed whenever I discover some small, useful, time saving way to make use of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined. Using free web content services like flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati that can travel the RSS road to dynamically update content elsewhere, moving from static hand spun web pages to live ones, is powerful stuff. So here is a roadmap of a change I set up in about 30 minutes time to rescue some stale links. This approach is something teachers can easily do to populate their own web sites with new web resources for their students, and can be done so efficiently, and without much effort. It fits in to an instructors own discovery process of resources, and boils down to: (1) Find interesting sites (2) Bookmark (using browser tool link) to del.icio.us (3) Tag [...]

Very cool.. Rob Wall, who blogs well as StigmergicWeb, shared, in advance, a presentation he did as a nice followup to our Small Technologies Loosely Joined session in Vancouver June, 2004. In Rob’s eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined, he makes the case for consideration of free, open source tools for creating learning contgent, and manages to work in that these are in essence “learning objects” (maybe). The nice part is Rob’s doing his presentation with such tools, ditching clunk PowerPoint for a svelte show using Eric Meyer’s S5 template. The slick thing Rob achieved was using the new OPML editing tool and an XML switch to actually construct the content (S5 is beautiful, but you still need to hand edit edit one basic HTML content file. And heck, look at the URL- the presentation link is ****.xml. Slick, well at least for us techies. Read up on Rob’s [...]

An email from Steve Cohen resulted in adding the 12th site, de.lirio.us to the Site Submission MultiTool– now you can pick and chose from a dozen different we site bookmarking sites, and build a single browser link bar tool to send sites to any or all of the 12 you like to use. Make your own today… How many more will there be?

The folksonomy – contralled vocabulary debates surge and sputter… Recently David Weinberger went “back and forth” on this: This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you’ll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as “pcforum05,” not “pcf”, “pcf05″ or “Esther’s thang.” Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies. A common assumption in this discussions is that the aim of tagging is the action of many to try and organize the un-organizable (web content). I see many more variations, and the success of flickr points to the important of tags but perhaps smaller groups of people aiming to tag a more discrete set of content. So what if my choice of [...]

Our Ocotillo project’s use of blogs+wikis+boards, coined last summer as “Small Technologies Loosely Joined”. The premise of this was that each of our 4 working groups would maintain a regularly updated blog as its public “face”, use discussion boards for some asynchronous dialogues (and guest experts), and the wikis for brainstorming. The suite of tools (MovableType for blogs, UseMod for wiki, and phpBB for the boards, plus an events database) were all threaded by RSS, meaning 4 groups with 4 channels each of feeds connected to one central “dashboard” view of our efforts. Things have moved along since our launch September 2004, and much overdue is an update of how this is going. Before revealing the grades, a few general observations: * The more familiar tools were more readliy accepted * It takes some compulsive personalities to be at this regularly * In a larger organization, time is needed to [...]

I am not sure yet what to make of wists – visual bookmarks, yet another variant following the flickr del.icio.us trail through the mountain pile of folksonomic tag mania. Create a wist account, load a browser bar tool, and when you are surfing and want to track a site in your “collection” (a del.icio.us task), wist offers to create an icon based on any image it can find in the page (quasi flickr-like). Slap on some tags, and see where your tags lead you. There is a friend of a friend thing there too, but I lack friends (apparently). You end up with a collection of tagged icons representing sites you have “wisted”. Since it syndicates, this is another one in the pack of Rip. Mix. Feed. I am wisting but I have no idea what I am doing.

I am supposed to be out the door about 5 minuntes ago when I get to curious to click on vimeo (tip of the blog hat to David Weinberger, thanks for making me later for dinner ;-) In a nutshell, it looks like a filckr for video, and it semms there are a lot of other folks moving “theirmedia” in this direction. What caught my attentions was that vimeo is taking tags applied to video clips, and assembling them dynamically into QuickTime flicks, such as the concert movies vimeo show. Ironically I had suggested something like this in the early pow-wows last summer when we met as the advisory board for the 2005 New Media Consortium Horizon project. My idea was not exactly what vimeo shows in tis beta, but I thought of something like a wiki for video content- where one could collaboratively mix and match and edit video [...]

I like Skype. I like Skype. I like it so much, I wanted to run it on my PC laptop across the desk from me. What I did not like was when I logged in with the account I use on my Mac, I notice that my contacts do not appear, so it seems that they are not stored centrally (like AIM, ICQ), but on my computer. This means that should I get a new computer, want to run this elsewhere, my contacts do not go with me. They need to be re-entered, re-authorized?? Tell me it isn’t so? Maybe I am missing the forest for a bamboo stick in front of my face, or I missed an obvious button menu item. It would hardly be the first time. Nope, it’s a FAQ, Jack, in Using Skype: You can log in to Skype from multiple computers, but you won’t have [...]