Blog Posts, Articles, and Reports To Read: October 2011

• “The Kindle Fire and Disruptive Innovation“
• “The A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags“
• “Uses for Audio in eLearning“
• “The future of online bookmarking“
• “At Last – Recognition for Blog-based Portfolios“
• “bPortfolios: Blogging for Reflective Practice“
• “Regaining Your Faculties“
• “Educators – Google Plus Is for You“
• “Content Curation: What Does it Take to Be Successful?“
• “How To Curate Conversations With Storify“
• “10 Tips on Curating Social Media Content for Your Nonprofit or Foundation“
• “4 Promising Curation Tools That Help Make Sense of the Web“

Video: “Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember!”

Video: “Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember!“

Resources for Using Diigo

Websites:

• Diigo
• Diigo V4 Help
• Diigo V4 Help:  Videos & Tutorials
• Diigo on Twitter
• Diigo Toolbar
• Diigo Blog
• Google Notebook:  Diigo Tutorials

Presentations:

• “Social Bookmarking Using Diigo“
• “Social Bookmarking for Educators with Diigo“
• “Diigo: Secrets of a Power User (NECC09)“

Videos (in addition to those in Diigo V4 Help):

• “Diigo Demo- Sharing and Collaborating“
• “Diigo Demo- Annotations“
• “Diigo Demo- Bookmarking“
• “Diigo Demo- Website“
• “Diigo Demo“
• “Diigo- very quick run through“
• “Diigo Registration“
• “A Guide to Annotating using Diigo“
• “Using Diigo and the Diigolet Tool for Research Purposes“
• “Using Diigo.“
• “Post Bookmarks to Diigo“
• “Diigo-Network“
• “Diigo Tutorial (groups)“
• “Diigo in the Classroom“
• “Diigo in the classroom“

Moving from Delicious to Diigo

I’ve moved my bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, which I’ll probably start using this summer for my second-semester freshman composition classes.  I’ve been requiring my students to create accounts on Delicious to bookmark sites they find and use for class.  This last semester, we had problems because new users are required to create new Yahoo! accounts or use existing ones.  Students who used existing accounts had trouble logging on again later.

Diigo appears to have all of the functions Delicious does and more, including

• groups
• highlighting and comments on webpages
• educational accounts
• messages
• blogs

Because of the EasyBlog feature, I can use Diigo instead of both Delicious and Blogger for my classes.  (I have my students use blogs as research journals.)  With the group feature, I won’t have to put links to students’ blogs and bookmarking accounts on the class wiki.

1500 Delicious Bookmarks

The 1500th bookmark in my Delicious account is a page on the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) site.

Presentation on Delicious

Tuesday I’ll be giving a short presentation, 10 to 15 minutes, about Delicious for All-College Development Day at Red Rocks Community College.

I found these recent YouTube videos that should be a good resource for anyone interested in using Delicious:

 

“Creating a Delicious Account“

 

“Adding Bookmarks to Delicious“

 

“Searching Delicious“

 

If I have time, which is unlikely, it might be worth mentioning delizzy and Bookmarks inSuggest.

New Addition to Recommended Reading List

I’ve added Ellyssa Kroski‘s Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals to my Recommended Reading list.  Even though it’s written for librarians, it’s a good introduction to web 2.0.  She has chapters on the following:

• web 2.0
• blogs
• RSS and newsreaders
• wikis
• social bookmarking
• photo sharing
• social cataloging
• video sharing
• personalized start pages
• social networking software
• vertical search engines
• social news
• answers technology
• virtual worlds
• productivity tools
• podcasting
• mashups

I do have a couple of objections to her classifications:  (1) She included Second Life in a book on “web 2.0.”  To access Second Life, you have to download their software; it cannot be accessed on the web (i.e., by using a browser).  Therefore, in my mind, it doesn’t belong in this book.  (2) She included Ning in a chapter on “Mashups” when it clearly fits under social networks.

Bookmarks inSuggest

As I promised in a post earlier this month, here is my take on Bookmarks inSuggest:

If you enter your Delicious username, Bookmarks inSuggest “will analyze your online bookmarks and recommend other bookmarks that matches your taste.” 

Once you’ve typed in the username and clicked on “Continue,” you’ll see the tags in a column on the left under a search box, the most recent bookmarks in the center, and the suggested sites on the right.

For my bookmarks, inSuggest listed twenty tags, starting with the following:

• web2.0
• education
• tools
• elearning
• research
• secondlife
• free
• searchengine
• reference
• technology

You may click on any of the tags listed to get some of your own bookmarks with that tag and suggested bookmarks using it.

On the main page for my Delicious account, my “Top 10 Tags” are listed as

• web2.0
• education
• tools
• research
• searchengine
• elearning
• free
• blog
• wiki
• reference

secondlife is not in my top ten, nor are reference and technology.  However, the first suggestions offered are for sites related to Second Life:

• The SLED Picayune
• ICT Library
• Virtual World Resources (titled “List of Virtual Worlds” on the inSuggest page)
• Video Tutorials – Second Life Wiki
• Event Details | Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences

The fourth suggestion I already had bookmarked, and the fifth had little to do with Second Life.  It was a program for a conference held in 2007 with some presentations on Second Life.

It’s not clear where the suggestions come from.

Web inSuggest

inSuggest has three different pages where you can get suggestions for websites, images, and bookmarks based on your input. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Web inSuggest, just put in the address of a site to get recommendations for similar sites. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used Wetpaint‘s home page and got the following top eight results:

• Wikispaces
• PBwiki
• Ning
• Zoho
• StumbleUpon
• Netvibes
• Go2Web20.net
• Weebly

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since the first two sites in the lefthand columns (Wikispaces and PBwiki) are the most closely related, I’m guessing that you should read down the first column and then down the second one to see now the results are ranked.

Given how little similarity (other than being web 2.0 applications) there is between Wetpaint and the other six hits, I’m not very impressed with the results I got.  Apparently someone has tagged the sites that come up, but I’m not sure who does that.  I couldn’t find a lot of information about inSuggest on the main page.

At some future time, I’ll look at Bookmark inSuggest.

New Delicious Is Stale

Some of the blogs I read regularly have recent posts about the “new Delicious”:

• ReadWriteWeb:  “Delicious Finally Launches Version 2.0: Easier, Prettier, Faster“
• Yahoo! Search Blog:  “Making Social Bookmarking a bit more Delicious“
• eLearning Technology:  “Delicious Upgrade Only Skin Deep:  eLearning Technology“
• Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day:  “Delicious“

According to the delicious blog, “The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.”  A faster search engine is good, but the rest of the updates seem to be just cosmetic.

One of the things I liked about the old del.icio.us was the clever name.  The new name is stale–to continue the food metaphor.

As I wrote in a post in April,

When I select a specific tag in my account, all the bookmarks with that particular tag show up, and I get a separate list of all the “related tags,” ones that appear with the first one on one or more bookmarks.  I have the option of clicking on the plus sign in front of any of those tags to limit the bookmarks showing to those with both tags–like a Boolean AND.  It would be really helpful to have to option of clicking on a minus sign–like a Boolean NOT–that would remove bookmarks with that tag.

In addition, since the site was changed, my new bookmarks haven’t been automatically posted to my blog as they were before.