Jon Udell goes into great depth about the potential for using del.icio.us
as a collaborative tool. My head hurts after reading it, but I actually
think I see some of the interesting ways that del.icio.us can connect
ideas and interests. Just one example; I didn’t realize that it not
only tells you who else posted the same bookmark, but it also tells you
how they tagged that bookmark so you can potentially easily subscribe
to that narrow topic via RSS feed. Not so with Furl, I don’t think.
He also suggests saving your own posts, which is something I had started to do with Furl
a while back. It didn’t last, however. The idea of going back and
tagging each post with keywords is daunting, but I can see the
reasoning behind it, I guess. It’s the index to the blog, more or less,
and I really like that concept. I do wish it was easier to retreive
certain ideas and posts that were written many moons ago now (I can’t
believe I’ve got almost three years worth of writing here…oy.)
But one obvious classroom use of either Furl or del.icio.us is having
students subscribe to to one of the teacher’s topic feeds. What a great
way to disctribute information. Phil Windley posted something similar a couple of days ago:
I’ve found Del.icio.us to be a great way to organize bookmarks and,
using the RSS feeds, have my students follow what I’m book marking.
When I want to bring something to their attention, I can just bookmark
it in Del.icio.us and they see it in their feedreader. Very easy to do.
I think this whole concept has some great applications,
but I’m not sure my feeble brain can sort through all the different
ways to make it happen. I’m feeling like that overload point is near
again…
Maybe I should do a Podcast.
This sounds like a great idea for my blog, I use Blogger which doesn’t support categories. It makes sense to look up posts via a subject index, using the default date doesn’t really help with context.
A great idea would be if FURL offered html code to embed a search box on your own blog to search its contents. You could do a general free search or choose a folder to search via a dropdown menu, or even search via keyword (which I think should be called descriptors or subject term)
Talking of FURL another thing I’ve mentioned to them is creating a visible index of your keywords. This way when you save a new document you can browse your keyword index and see what terms are available from your collection, this way you have a more strict or controlled vocabularly. At the moment I can’t remember keywords I assigned in the past to similar documents I save now.
http://acnmlibrary.blogspot.com
I’ve been getting my hands dirty in del.icio.us lately and actually just posted about it earlier today. There’s a utility called nutr.itio.us for it that does exactly what you’re talking about with a few extra perks. You can see a list of all your keywords so you can add them visually. You can also see how OTHER people tagged the same post to give you some ideas for how to classify a bookmark. it’s a nice addition to the traditional post form.
http://www.teach42.com