David Wiley writes:

I think we may know how to mashup “even unpopular tools,” depending on
what one means by mashup. By mashup, I mean utilizing a wide range of
individual tools (like flickr, delicious, technorati, etc.) and
aggregating the results of those uses into a collection of data that I
can do new things with. If this is what we mean by mashup, I think that
RSS and our imaginations give us most of the answers we need.

I agree with David, though with two rather large caveats: ease-of-use and federated data sharing.

RSS does give us the base to remix using different tools, but the ease-of-use and integration can stand a lot of improvement. This is also a matter of conception and terminology: simple aggregation is relatively easy, even for the non-technically inclined, but real remixing still has a long way to go, particularly if students are going to be able to synthesize, remix, and share. I still find myself having to go through contortions (custom programming) just to achieve relatively simple integration from different sources.

Finding a way to federate data is also going to become more and more important. It’s an interesting feature of many social tools that they thrive as they scale… the more users, the better the experience will be for each. As early pioneers  like flickr and del.icio.us are joined by dozens of competitors, the fractured store of data impacts the whole system.

Ultimately, for example, it shouldn’t matter if a user chooses del.icio.us, furl, spurl, or others as their front-end to manage their bookmark data, the core of that data should be federated across systems. Rather than compete in the zero-sum game of locking users in, these services should compete in terms of interface, features, and data mining techniques to the pool of aggregated data.

If there is no sharing, then all the remixing tools in the world become weakened (if not irrelevant) because people will be operating solely within their own, limited ecosystem and an artificially stunted folksonomy.

[ruminate, social software, remix, rss, edtech, federate]

Tony Hirst has written a series of pieces about using social bookmarking tools productively in higher education, beginning with a general entry and then getting much more specific:

• Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Software
• Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Bookmarks
• Towards a Managed Social Bookmarking Environment in Higher Education
• Seven Ways of Using Social Bookmarking

There’s some good stuff here, particularly some specific thinking about how to really use the social bookmark sites. He lists a few reasons for wanting to implement the resource-sharing system institutionally rather than use existing services, with the requisite amount of skepticism (unintended learning is a bad thing?). But the overarching problem is the catch-22 of social software– creating an artifical scarcity by segregating the userbase weakens the system drastically…

[ruminate social+software edtech tagging bookmarks]

Joshua spoke at Harvard’s Berkman Center a few days ago on the topic of tagging, folksonomy, del.icio.us, etc. Some blog-notes:

• David Weinberg’s notes on the first session
• David’s synopsis of interesting points
• Beth Kanter’s notes on the second session

The New York Times finally gets on the folksonomy bandwagon. Not bad for a popular media article, though perhaps a bit opaque in terms of the real benefits.

[ruminate folksonomy tagging]

The latest brain-child of Chris Pirillo, http://gada.be is– as far as I can tell– essentially a combination of tagging and meta-search. Like Technorati, the service is accessible through user-created tags. But instead of being taken to an aggregation of others using those tags, you are taken to a collection of search results using that term from a vetted collection of search engines.

I’m not sure how useful this is. I find more interest in the intersection of those things which have been purposefully tagged with a term rather than the same term happening to occurr in the text of an article or blog post which may have nothing really to do with the topic.

Really, I guess I want both. Ideally clicking on one of the tags below a post like this one would take you to an automatic meta-page which would show you other related posts in this blog, and all the information resources aggregated by Technorati and gada.be. In fact, that’s such a workable idea I think I’ll add it to my “someday” list.

[ruminate gada.be technorati opml search tagging folksonomy]

From Adam Kalsey comes Tagyu, a service to help choose tags for a link (or text). Directly addressing the question of how much one should pay attention to convention when tagging. It would be cool to have a service like this tied directly into my del.icio.us posting extension so that, in addition to my own tags, I could see what others use at that critical point when I am actually adding the link.

[ruminate tagging social software folksonomy]

Find a flickr tag you are interested in, such as Alaska. Append /clusters/ to the URL (or click on the appropriate clusters link) to browse through clustered/related tags and photos. Pretty great!

[Ruminate flickr tagging folksonomy]

I work mostly with post-secondary educators, but watching and learning from Doug has highlighted the need for more social software tools geared towards K-12 use.

Scuttledu is one of those efforts, essentially a del.icio.us service for classroom use, particularly K-12. It’s hard to say how successful this effort will be as a content aggregator, but maybe it will find a good niche catering to the specific needs of users like Doug as the revolutionize the K-12 classroom.

[Ruminate edtech social software]

Thanks to a pointer from Brian Del Vecchio, I have just now discovered the H20 Playlist service [see some discussion at MetaFilter and Joho the Blog].

How did I miss this? Real answer: because I haven’t kept up with my regular blog roundup, which includes Brian and Joho the Blog.

At any rate, this is an amazing concept that combines a number of interesting ideas: the basic product is a tagged and folksonomized “playlist” of web links to resources (sites, books), along with comments and reviews/ratings. As lists become tangled together through references you can see how influential a list is, as well as maneuver through all the linked playlists. Perfect for educational enrichment. Now let’s get flickr to play too…

This is fascinating stuff that I will be making immediate use of both practically, and as an example of the direction services are going in integrating services and the ideas of social economy, folksonomy, etc.

[ruminate social software h2o h20 folksonomy edtech]

Something strange going on with Technorati. Earlier today I was looking at the Technorati Cosmos for this site, and I’d gained about a dozen new links, most because of people who had referenced my recent article on “The Social Life of Students.”

Now when I tested the link from the class site, the listing is back to where it was a few days ago, no sign of the links from recent days. Strange… and it makes the point of my discussion about Technorati and the blog “cosmos” a bit less on point!