Delicious deli.cio.us

My favorite thing about Delicious is the way I use it to trap information about sites I'd like to explore further or catalog in some way. I have a very quick process in place. One might argue that I should be doing more annotating, and I certainly could if I were using it more for teaching than for personal use.

Here's what I do: with the Delicious Add-On for Firefox, when I star a page to add it to my Firefox bookmarks (one click, inside the address bar) I'm prompted as to whether I'd also like to save the page to Delicious. I probably do so about 85% of the time. One click for 'Yes', and then a chance to add tags. Typically several of my existing tags will match the most popular tags for the page, so I just click on each of those, save and I'm done. If I like I can add an explanation in the notes as to where I found the link or why I'm bookmarking the site; if it hasn't been bookmarked by others I may check if this is indeed the link I want (and not one too deep on the site), and if it is, I'll enter a few summary tags which will suffice and then Save.

If I'm browsing in Chrome or IE I currently use an Add to Delicious bookmarklet and then proceed as above. I may install a Delicious Extension to Chrome soon.

I'm looking forward to building units with Diigo with some of my colleagues. For now, Delicious helps me to leave breadcrumbs as I explore the web.

The Big Questions: Next Steps

The Big Questions: Next Steps

Posted using ShareThis

Super-quick research by building CrunchBase widgets.

I generated this content to embed from CrunchBase in about a minute. It took more time to decide which products or companies to test with than it did to copy and paste the widget code into my blog. And because it's running JavaScript queries, the data should improve with time (I think). How cool is that?

CrunchBase Information

Goodreads

Google Buzz

Shelfari

Diigo

del.icio.us

LibraryThing

Information provided by CrunchBase

Wiki Work

I love adding content to our FHS Learning Commons wiki and watching it take shape as others build on it. This week the navigation changes on PBworks have thrown me a bit of a curve, and I'm interested to hear what other users think. See yesterday's post on the official PBworks blog, "Navigation Improvements are Live! As an administrator and user of several wikis I find the added tabs and breadcrumbs to be helpful, but I'm concerned it may look too busy for some of our community members (both teachers and students).

I'm still looking at others' best practices in designing wiki (and website) navigation. What are some of your favorites?

Is this simpler or more complex? Ping.fm and Google Buzz...

Tonight I got an email from Loic Le Meur of Team Seesmic: "With all the buzz around Google Buzz, I have some exciting news to share! If you add your Google Talk (GTalk) account to Ping.fm and then add Gtalk as a service to Google Buzz, you will instantly update Google Buzz exactly at the same time as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and the 50 social networks supported by Ping.fm. It is also much faster than adding Twitter as a service to Google Buzz which can be delayed up to an hour for your updates to show on Buzz. You can then update ping.fm from any app supporting it (all Seesmic apps very soon), sms, email or.... chat. Very handy." Get step-by-step instructions on Seesmic's blog.


I'll be trying it out this month. If you see any weirdness in my update streams, comment here or otherwise let me know!

Allow me to elaborate...

The Common Craft video Blogs in Plain English asks the question, "But really, isn't everything news to someone?" In the long tail of online news, perhaps there are a few people who will read updates from a high school librarian participating in the 21st-Century revolution in education. I can't really say why more than 400 people are following me on Twitter, unless they're just being polite. I'd like to think we're growing our Professional Learning Networks.

If you'd like to suggest I follow your blog or follow your Twitter activity, please leave me a comment here. Thanks for your attention.

Why blog?

Two quick answers in video form: Blogs in Plain English from Common Craft, and The Machine is Us/ing Us from Michael Wesch at Kansas State:

Hello World.