Delicious launched a complete redesign of their site a couple days ago. There are a lot of new features and better navigation. And, you can now get there using the delicious.com url.
There’s a rundown of all the new features in the What’s New page on delicious, and ReadWriteWeb has a pretty good writeup of the changes.
The latest in the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About … ” series.
7 Things You Should Know About Second Life
Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters
of virtual lands, more than 13 million “residents,” and a thriving
economy. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases,
individual departments or faculty—are active in Second Life, not only
for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities
for prospective students, and fundraising. Second Life lets educators
easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different
strategies for a physical space affect learning, and a similar approach
can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.
I have an account in SL and spent way too much time trying to make my avatar look even remotely like me (although for some people, maybe that’s not the goal). I haven’t explored very much but I do know there is a Second Life Library Project. Right now my first life is leaving me barely enough time for sleep and a small guilty dosage of bad television.
This from the Chronicle Wired Campus:
Wired Campus: Twitter Ideas for Libraries - Chronicle.com
The Web site College@Home has put together a nice list of ideas for libraries interested in using the instant-blogging service Twitter.
More…
I’ve resisted Twitter so far because I’m trying to reduce the number of distractions that keep me from… well… work. I can see though how it could make it easier to do some things. Just yesterday I was trying to help diagnose a IP authentication problem with a new database. It seemed to be working from some subnets but not others. I was going through my IM list looking for people to help me test but it would have been much easier to send out something over Twitter so that whoever was available could to respond or not.
Maybe it’s time to jump in.
Hot on the heels of Corey’s great work with del.icio.us at the Foster Business Library, I wanted to post about another use for del.icio.us, just completed this quarter. UW Bothell faculty Gray Kochhar-Lindgren and I, with the help of Leslie Bussert, created an assignment for an interdisciplinary inquiry course in which students used del.icio.us to thoughtfully save, categorize, describe, and share information resources.
Through internet research and emerging UW Libraries’ tools, students created a research repository online that was required to be at least 20 resources deep. The “bookmark & share” widget that has been added to UW’s WorldCat catalog, for example, enables students to seamlessly post specific research resources to del.icio.us and annotate them. The faculty and I recently evaluated the students’ work, and are currently working on compiling their reflections and feedback about the assignment. I look forward to reporting on the success of using this free web 2.0 technology to enhance student research.
I recently discovered ibreadcrumbs, which is specifically created for online research and collaboration. This will be an interesting tool to track. -AH
I just finished a project to move all of our business related web links into del.icio.us. Previously, they had been in a MySQL database with Perl scripts that I wrote almost eight years ago to build the web pages of categorized listings. I also had a web based admin module that was also written in Perl that was getting long in the tooth.
I finally got tired of dealing with my clunky admin module and decided to look for a better way. I found this article in Library Journal: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us and looked at the page at the College of New Jersey Library for inspiration. From there it was just a matter of setting up an account for the library in del.icio.us and bookmarking and tagging all 440(!) sites from the database that we had collected over the years.
The end result is a collection of links that is much easier to maintain and, more important, much easier for me to give to someone else to maintain. I’m able to use the link roll function to pull in the links into a static page in the Libraries web space. And, it has the flexibility to create many more discrete collections of links and could make it easier to create situationally specific collections such as for a particular class or assignment, or even for a reference transaction.
Links:
Foster Business Library - Business Resources on the Web
International Business Resources page with del.icio.us links
International Business links in del.icio.us
Foster Business Library del.icio.us collection (http://del.icio.us/FosterLibrary)
A lot of months ago (OK, maybe three, who knows) I signed up to be on the beta list for Twine. I had no idea what it was at the time, the marketing hype made little sense to me so I pretty much just forgot about it. Well, last week I got my invitation and I signed up.
So far, I’ve played and poked a little, I joined the Library 2.0 twine, I read some posts from people who are saying that it’s “addicting.” Then I got the flu and couldn’t look at anything but the insides of my eyelids for a few days.
Now I’m back in, still looking around with this uneasy feeling that there’s some fundamental semantic web coolness about Twine that I’m just missing. Is this the one social thingadoodle to bind them all? Maybe I’m not getting it because I’m not, you know, social. Maybe it’s because I’m one of those people who needs to see each line before I can see the whole picture.
Whatever the case, I’ll keep poking around and maybe, at some point, the picture will come into focus. Until then, I’ve got some invites if you want to come and play. Drop me an email or comment on this post if you want one of the invites.
- Corey
The latest in the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About …” series.
7 Things You Should Know About Ning
Ning is an online service that allows users to create their own social networks and join and participate in other networks. No technical skill is required to set up a social network, and there are no limits to the number of networks a user can join. Users of Ning social networks have access to functionality similar to that of more well-known social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Various features allow users to read news or learn about related events, join groups, read and comment on blog entries, view photos and videos, and other activities as set up by the network creator. RSS feeds let users subscribe to updates from specific parts of the social network.
I’ve played around on Ning a little and joined the Library2.0 Ning group/network. Seems like it could be an effective way to set up micro-issue social networks or a single use network for a project.
- Corey
The DLF ILS and Discovery Systems group is proposing
standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.
This set of standards (nicknamed the “Berkeley Accord”) would support:
A number of ILS vendors have already signed on. Our own, beloved, Innovative Interfaces being the exception. See the full announcement on Peter Brantley’s blog here.
I started playing around with the Google Dynamic Feed Control and Yahoo Pipes to see what it would look like to bring together all the RSS and blog feeds in the Libraries. I put up a couple of test pages:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss.html
and
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss2.html
The first example is just using the Google Dynamic Feed Control and the second is using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds into a single feed and Google Dynamic Feed Control to display the feed on the page. I like the simplicity of the second view, but (as was pointed out to me) you lose the context of the feed source that you get in the first view.
I only include the half dozen-ish blogs and feeds that I could find. If you know of any other UW Libraries feeds, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.
And, to give credit where credit is due, Jake was playing with both of these tools long before I was. He has a test page using the Google Dynamic Feed Control at:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/rss/intlstudies/newspage/newstest.html
and all of the new books lists that he does for International Studies is using Yahoo Pipes.
Corey
JotSpot, the structured wiki that was bought by Google in 2006 and promptly closed down to new users has been opened back up to the world as Google Sites. Sites is part of the Google Apps suite of productivity and collaboration tools and lets you quickly and easily build web pages and collaboration spaces and include file attachments, information from other Google applications (documents, calendar, YouTube videos, images from Picassa) as well as free form content.
I’m signing up and poking around, but since the name of the game is collaboration, it’ll be more fun if there are others in there to play with. If you sign up, send me a note and we can try to take it through its paces.
-Corey