Tag Archives: del.icio.us

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Sharing Tool Wishlist

4 Comments

The following is an edited version of a wishlist I had been keeping on the side. The main idea is to define what would be, in my mind, the “ultimate social bookmarking system.” Which, obviously, goes way beyond social bookmarking. In a way, I even conceive of it as the ultimate tool for sharing online content. Yes, it’s that ambitious. Will it ever exist? Probably not. Should it exist? I personally think so. But I may be alone in this. Surely, you’ll tell me that I am indeed alone, which is fine. As long as you share your own wishlist items.

The trigger for my posting this is that someone contacted me, asking for what I’d like in a social bookmarking system. I find this person’s move quite remarkable, as a thoughtful strategy. Not only because this person contacted me directly (almost flattering), but because such a request reveals an approach to listening and responding to people’s needs that I find lacking in some software development circles.

This person’s message served as a prompt for my blogging this, but I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while. In fact, my guess is that I created a first version of this wishlist in 2007 after having it on my mind for a while before that. As such, it represents a type of “diachronic” or “longitudinal” view of social bookmarking and the way it works in the broader scheme of social media.

Which also means that I wrote this before I heard about Google Wave. In fact, I’m still unclear about Google Wave and I’ll need to blog about that. Not that I expect Wave to fulfill all the needs I set up for a sharing tool, but I get the impression that Google is finally putting some cards on the table.

The main part of this post is in outline form. I often think through outlines, especially with such a type of notes. I fully realize that it may not be that clear, as a structure, for other people to understand. Some of these bullet points cover a much broader issue than what they look like. But the overall idea might be fairly obvious to grasp, even if it may sound crazy to other people.

I’m posting this to the benefit of anyone who may wish to build the killer app for social media. Of course, it’s just one man’s opinion. But it’s my entitled opinion.

Concepts

What do we share online?

  • “Link”
  • “Page”
  • Identified content
  • Text
    • Narrative
    • Contact information
    • Event description
  • Contact information
  • Event invitation
  • Image
  • Recording
  • Structured content
  • Snippet
  • Access to semi-private content
  • Site’s entry point

Selective sharing

Private
  • Archiving
  • Cloud access
Individually shared
  • “Check this out”
  • Access to address book
  • Password protection
  • Specialization/expertise
  • Friendship
Group shared
  • Shared interests (SIG)
  • Collaboration (task-based)
Shared through network
  • Define identity in network
  • Semi-public
Public
  • Publishing
  • Processed
  • Reading lists

Notetaking

  • Active reading
  • Anchoring text
  • Ad hoc list of bookmarks
  • “Empty URL”
    • Create container/page
    • Personal notes

Todos

  • To read
  • To blog
  • To share
  • To update
  • Projects
    • GTD
    • Contexts
  • Add to calendar (recognized as event)

Outlining/Mindmapping

  • Manage lists of links
  • Prioritize
  • Easily group

Social aspects of sharing

  • Gift economy
  • Personal interaction
  • Trust
  • Hype
  • Value
  • Customized

Cloud computing

  • Webware
  • “Online disk”
  • Without download
  • Touch devices
  • Edit online

Personal streaming

  • Activities through pages
  • Logging
  • Flesh out personal profile

Tagging

  • “Folksonomy”
  • Enables non-hierarchical structure
  • Semantic fields
  • Related tags
  • Can include hierarchy
  • Tagclouds define concept map

Required Features

Crossplatform, crossbrowser

  • Browser-specific tools
  • Bookmarklets
  • Complete access through cloud
Keyboard shortcuts
  • Quick add (to account)
  • Vote
  • Bookmark all tabs (à la Flock)
  • Quick tags

Related pages

Recommended
  • Based on social graph
  • Based on tags
  • Based on content
  • Based on popularity
  • Pointing to this page

Quickly enter links

  • Add in place (while editing)
  • Similar to “spell as you type”
  • Incremental search
  • Add full link (title, URL, text, metadata)

Archiving

  • Prevent linkrot
  • Prepare for post-processing (offline reading, blogging…)
  • Enable bulk processing
  • Maintain version history
  • Internet Archive

Automatic processing

  • Tags
  • Summary
  • Wordcount
  • Reading time
  • Language(s)
  • Page structure analysis
  • Geotagging
  • Vote

Thread following

  • Blog comments
  • Forum comments
  • Trackbacks
  • Pings

Exporting

All
  • Archiving
  • Prepare for import
  • Maintain hierarchy
Selected
  • Tag
  • Category
  • Recently used
  • Shared
  • Site homepage
  • Blogroll
  • Blogs
Formats
  • Other services
  • HTML
  • RSS
  • OPML
  • Widget
Features
  • Comments
  • Tags
  • Statistics
  • Content

Offline processing

  • Browser-based
  • Device based
  • Offline archiving
  • Include content
  • Synchronization

Microblogging support

  • Laconi.ca/Identi.ca
  • Twitter
  • Ping.fm
  • Jaiku

Fixed/Static URL

  • Prevent linkrot
  • Maintain list for same page
  • Short URLs
  • Automatically generated
  • Expansion on mouseover
  • Statistics

Authentication

  • Use of resources
  • Identify
  • Privacy
  • Unnecessary for basic processing
  • Sticks (no need to login frequently)
  • Access to contacts and social graph
  • Multiple accounts
    • Personal/professional
    • Contexts
    • Group accounts
  • Premium accounts
    • Server space
    • Usage statistics
    • Promotion
  • Support
    • OpenID
      • As group login
    • Google Accounts
    • Facebook Connect
    • OAuth

Integration

  • Web history
  • Notebook
  • Blogging platform
  • Blog editor
  • Microblogging platform
  • Logbook
  • General purpose content editor
  • Toolbar
  • URL shortening
  • Address book
  • Social graph
  • Personal profile
  • Browser
    • Bookmarks
    • History
    • Autocomplete
  • Analytics
  • Email
  • Search
    • Online
    • Offline

Related Tools

  • Diigo
  • WebCitation
  • Ping.fm
  • BackType
  • Facebook share
  • Blog This
  • Link This
  • Share this
  • Digg
  • Plum
  • Spurl
  • CoComments
  • MyBlogLog
  • TwtVite
  • Twistory
  • Windows Live Writer
  • Magnolia
  • Stumble Upon
  • Delicious
  • Google Reader
  • Yahoo Pipes
  • Google Notebook
  • Zoho Notebook
  • Google Browser Sync
  • YouTube
  • Flock
  • Zotero

Relevant Blogposts

Academia, Austin, Beer, Blogger (Blogspot), Blogging, Coffee, Communities, course management systems, craft beer culture, critical thinking, cultural anthropology, Education, ethnomusicology, expertise, Facebook, folkloristics, Food, geek culture, globalisation, hedonism, higher education, homebrewing, homeroasting, Humanities, iPod, iPod touch, iTunes, linguistic anthropology, mac os x, mailing-lists, Montreal, Moodle, music, note-taking, online communities, Outlining, PDAs, podcasts, Québec, ramblings, social capital, social media, social networks, social sciences, technology, trends, Twitter, WordPress.com, workflow, YouTube

Selling Myself Long

8 Comments

Been attending sessions by Meri Aaron Walker about online methods to get paid for our expertise. Meri coaches teachers about those issues.

MAWSTOOLBOX.COM

There’s also a LearnHub “course”: Jumpstart Your Online Teaching Career.

Some notes, on my own thinking about monetization of expertise. Still draft-like, but RERO is my battle cry.

Some obstacles to my selling expertise:

  • My “oral personality.”
  • The position on open/free knowledge in academia and elsewhere.
  • My emphasis on friendship and personal rapport.
  • My abilities as an employee instead of a “boss.”
  • Difficulty in assessing the value of my expertise.
  • The fact that other people have the same expertise that I think I have.
  • High stakes (though this can be decreased, in some contexts).
  • My distaste for competition/competitiveness.
  • Difficulty at selling and advertising myself (despite my social capital).
  • Being a creative generalist instead of a specialist.

Despite all these obstacles, I have been thinking about selling my services online.

One reason is that I really do enjoy teaching. As I keep saying, teaching is my hobby (when I get paid, it’s to learn how to interact with other learners and to set up learning contexts).

In fact, I enjoy almost everything in teaching (the major exception being grading/evaluating). From holding office hours and lecturing to facilitating discussions and answering questions through email. Teaching, for me, is deeply satisfying and I think that learning situations which imply the role of a teacher still make a lot of sense. I also like more informal learning situations and I even try to make my courses more similar to informal teaching. But I still find specific value in a “teaching and learning” system.

Some people seem to assume that teaching a course is the same thing as “selling expertise.” My perspective on learning revolves to a large extent on the difference between teaching and “selling expertise.” One part is that I find a difference between selling a product or process and getting paid in a broader transaction which does involve exchange about knowledge but which isn’t restricted to that exchange. Another part is that I don’t see teachers as specialists imparting their wisdom to eager masses. I see knowledge as being constructed in diverse situations, including formal and informal learning. Expertise is often an obstacle in the kind of teaching I’m interested in!

Funnily enough, I don’t tend to think of expertise as something that is easily measurable or transmissible. Those who study expertise have ways to assess something which is related to “being an expert,” especially in the case of observable skills (many of those are about “playing,” actually: chess, baseball, piano…). My personal perspective on expertise tends to be broader, more fluid. Similar to experience, but with more of a conscious approach to learning.

There also seems to be a major difference between “breadth of expertise” and “topics you can teach.” You don’t necessarily need to be very efficient at some task to help someone learn to do it. In fact, in some cases, being proficient in a domain is an obstacle to teaching in that domain, since expertise is so ingrained as to be very difficult to retrieve consciously.

This is close to “do what I say, not what I do.” I even think that it can be quite effective to actually instruct people without direct experience of these instructions. Similar to consulting, actually. Some people easily disagree with this point and some people tease teachers about “doing vs. teaching.” But we teachers do have a number of ways to respond, some of them snarkier than others. And though I disagree with several parts of his attitude, I quite like this short monologue by Taylor Mali about What Teachers Make.

Another reason I might “sell my expertise” is that I genuinely enjoy sharing my expertise. I usually provide it for free, but I can possibly relate to the value argument. I don’t feel so tied to social systems based on market economy (socialist, capitalist, communist…) but I have to make do.

Another link to “selling expertise” is more disciplinary. As an ethnographer, I enjoy being a “cultural translator.” of sorts. And, in some cases, my expertise in some domains is more of a translation from specialized speech into laypeople’s terms. I’m actually not very efficient at translating utterances from one language to another. But my habit of navigating between different “worlds” makes it possible for me to bridge gaps, cross bridges, serve as mediator, explain something fairly “esoteric” to an outsider. Close to popularization.

So, I’ve been thinking about what can be paid in such contexts which give prominence to expertise. Tutoring, homework help, consulting, coaching, advice, recommendation, writing, communicating, producing content…

And, finally, I’ve been thinking about my domains of expertise. As a “Jack of All Trades,” I can list a lot of those. My level of expertise varies greatly between them and I’m clearly a “Master of None.” In fact, some of them are merely from personal experience or even anecdotal evidence. Some are skills I’ve been told I have. But I’d still feel comfortable helping others with all of them.

I’m funny that way.

Domains of  Expertise

French

  • Conversation
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Culture
  • Literature
  • Regional diversity
  • Chanson appreciation

Bamanan (Bambara)

  • Greetings
  • Conversation

Social sciences

  • Ethnographic disciplines
  • Ethnographic field research
  • Cultural anthropology
  • Linguistic anthropology
  • Symbolic anthropology
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Folkloristics

Semiotics

Language studies

  • Language description
  • Social dimensions of language
  • Language change
  • Field methods

Education

  • Critical thinking
  • Lifelong learning
  • Higher education
  • Graduate school
  • Graduate advising
  • Academia
  • Humanities
  • Social sciences
  • Engaging students
  • Getting students to talk
  • Online teaching
  • Online tools for teaching

Course Management Systems (Learning Management Systems)

  • Oncourse
  • Sakai
  • WebCT
  • Blackboard
  • Moodle

Social networks

  • Network ethnography
  • Network analysis
  • Influence management

Web platforms

  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Ning
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Jaiku
  • YouTube
  • Flickr

Music

  • Cultural dimensions of music
  • Social dimensions of music
  • Musicking
  • Musical diversity
  • Musical exploration
  • Classical saxophone
  • Basic music theory
  • Musical acoustics
  • Globalisation
  • Business models for music
  • Sound analysis
  • Sound recording

Beer

  • Homebrewing
  • Brewing techniques
  • Recipe formulation
  • Finding ingredients
  • Appreciation
  • Craft beer culture
  • Brewing trends
  • Beer styles
  • Brewing software

Coffee

  • Homeroasting
  • Moka pot brewing
  • Espresso appreciation
  • Coffee fundamentals
  • Global coffee trade

Social media

Blogging

  • Diverse uses of blogging
  • Writing tricks
  • Workflow
  • Blogging platforms

Podcasts

  • Advantages of podcasts
  • Podcasts in teaching
  • Filming
  • Finding podcasts
  • Embedding content

Technology

  • Trends
  • Geek culture
  • Equipment
  • Beta testing
  • Troubleshooting Mac OS X

Online Life

Communities

  • Mailing-lists
  • Generating discussions
  • Entering communities
  • Building a sense of community
  • Diverse types of communities
  • Community dynamics
  • Online communities

Food

  • Enjoying food
  • Cooking
  • Baking
  • Vinaigrette
  • Pizza dough
  • Bread

Places

  • Montreal, Qc
  • Lausanne, VD
  • Bamako, ML
  • Bloomington, IN
  • Moncton, NB
  • Austin, TX
  • South Bend, IN
  • Fredericton, NB
  • Northampton, MA

Pedestrianism

  • Carfree living
  • Public transportation
  • Pedestrian-friendly places

Tools I Use

  • PDAs
  • iPod
  • iTunes
  • WordPress.com
  • Skype
  • Del.icio.us
  • Diigo
  • Blogger (Blogspot)
  • Mac OS X
  • Firefox
  • Flock
  • Internet Explorer
  • Safari
  • Gmail
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Maps
  • Zotero
  • Endnote
  • RefWorks
  • Zoho Show
  • Wikipedia
  • iPod touch
  • SMS
  • Outlining
  • PowerPoint
  • Slideshare
  • Praat
  • Audacity
  • Nero Express
  • Productivity software

Effective Web searches

Socialization

  • Social capital
  • Entering the field
  • Creating rapport
  • Event participation
  • Event hosting

Computer Use

  • Note-taking
  • Working with RSS feeds
  • Basic programing concepts
  • Data manipulations

Research Methods

  • Open-ended interviewing
  • Qualitative data analysis

Personal

  • Hedonism
  • Public speaking
  • GERD
  • Strabismus
  • Moving
  • Cultural awareness
Blogging, comment-fishing, commenting, Creative Commons, Facebook, ramblings, social, social capital, social contract, social media, social networks, social publishing, sophistication, trust, Twitter, Web 2.0, YouTube

Obvious Concept: Confidentiality (Draft)

1 Comment

In response to Émilie Pelletier, who replied to my previous post on “intimacy.” That previous post of mine wasn’t  well thought out and I hesitated before pushing the “Publish” button. But given Émilie’s thoughtful response, I’m glad I posted it. It makes for a somewhat more “interactive conversation” (!)  than the typical blogging session.

What seems in what I describe is that “social media” are about managing the way “content” is transmitted (on Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us, Facebook, BitTorrent, LinkedIn…). In this sense, “social media” are quite easy to understand, even though the diversity of “social media” systems  available obscures this simplicity. Hence the cyclical discussions about what constitutes “Web 2.0” and what is coming next.

The “obvious concept” I was trying to describe in my previous is a simplified version of the concept of “intimacy” we all seem to have in mind. Émilie did a good job at describing important dimensions of intimacy in social life and I should address those later. Admittedly, my use of the term “intimacy” was quite confusing and not at all obvious. The concept I tried to describe seems to me rather obvious but it doesn’t make it easy to describe or name. I know, some people might jump at this and say that what is easy to understand must be easy to explain. Yet many concepts are rather easy to grasp and quite hard to explain, especially in a “one-way conversation” such as a blogpost.

Anyhoo.

“Intimacy” isn’t such a good word for what I meant. I didn’t want to use “privacy” because it’s being used for slightly different purposes, in those social media. I could have worked to define “privacy” more precisely but I thought the term itself would have prevented further discussion since “privacy” is so well-known, in “social media.” Again, I agree with Émilie that “intimacy” isn’t more accurate, but it seems to have worked in making people think. Nice!

Come to think of it, “confidentiality” would possibly work better. In these same social media (e.g, Facebook), «confidentialité» is the translation of “privacy” but there are differences between the two concepts. Putting “trust” and “confidant” in relation to “confidentiality” gets closer to the slightly more subtle transmission management I had in mind. Some items are shared “in private” based on a level of trust that nothing will leak out, neither the content nor the fact that content was transmitted. Other items can be shared through controlled (semi-private) channels with the intention of “spreading out” the item and making the transmission known. Quite frequently, such transmission is more effective at “becoming viral” because content is properly contextualized. The “contract” of any transmission of information has such rules embedded in them and “sharing content online” is simple enough a process to be formalized in these ways.
The other dimension we tend to embed in “online content transmission” is what’s often called “reputation” or “authority” in those same “social media.” Again, very simplified versions of what happens in communication broadly, but the simple social models work well in those simplified “social media.” The “receiver” of the content may trust the “sender” based on a series of simple criteria. Trained to think that we should never “trust information” based on the sender, I used to (and still) react negatively to notions of “trust,” “authority,” or “reputation.” Slashdot’s concept of “karma” seemed somewhat better at the time because it sets apart the social capital from a notion of “blind faith.” I now understand more clearly what role trust might play in receiving content, especially in preventing malware to spread or managing our concentration. Simplified, this concept of trust is only indirectly about the value of the content itself. It’s more about assessing the risks involved in the content transmission event. In other words, we should only open email attachments from  people we trust and, even then, we know there are risks involved in opening attachments.

So, going back to the obvious concept I’m circling around. What Facebook just did in terms of privacy controls  does seem to connect with what I have in mind. Not only can we group contacts but we can finally use these groups to manage how widely some content may be distributed. Neat and rather easy. But some dimensions could be added to make content transmission approximate a bit better the sophistication of social life. For instance, there could be ways to make intermediate receivers understand how widely the content can be “redistributed.” Is it “for your eyes only” or is it “please distribute to all like-minded people?” An easy step to take, here, would be to add a type of license-control reminiscent of Creative Commons, on user-generated content. There could be something about the original creator of the content (“I’m only posting this because I like, I don’t claim ownership”). Ratings, which are so common in “social media” could be added and fleshed out so that a creator could key her/his work in the right frame.

Ok, I’m rambling even more now than before. So I’ll leave this post as-is and see what happens.

No, I won’t even replace all those quotation marks or correct my mistakes. RERO.

Do with this post as you want. I’m just thinking out loud.  And laughing on the inside.

Digital Life, social bookmarking, tagging, Twitter, workflow

TIU: Spurl

6 Comments

Tools I Use: Spurl.net 1.0 – Free online bookmarks with so much more…

Been using Spurl for a while now. Far from perfect but very useful. To me, it brings together the functionalities of Del.icio.us (and other “social bookmarking” services) with those of the Scrapbook Firefox extension. Like Delicious, it allows you to tag and share bookmarks. Like Scrapbook, it keeps a copy of the bookmarked page.

At this point, I got the habit of spurling just anything that I find interesting on the Web. In some cases, I also blog on the bookmarked item. But I don’t necessarily feel a need to put everything in my “to-blog” list. I don’t even tag my bookmarks.

The upshot of my spurling habits is that anyone who wants to know what I’m reading on the Web can just look at my Spurl RSS feed (or Atom feed). In this case, Spurl serves one of the purposes people are using Twitter and other nanoblogging tools for. Yeah, I know it’s not the same thing at all. But, to me, spurling is the lazyperson’s version of nanoblogging.

Now, once the Flock browser does “spell as you type” and Spurl does del.icio.us syncs, I could just use keystrokes to spurl pages I visit.

Hey! Who do you call “lazy?”

Blogging, commenting, mac os x, PDAs, tagging, Web 2.0, WordPress.com

Bookmarks and Tags

3 Comments

In response to Jess on organising one’s information.

FavoUrites: Social Bookmarking (PART)

My own use of social bookmarking isn’t that social nor that efficient. At this point, I tend to simply add things to my del.icio.us account as a way to remind myself that I would eventually like to blog about those links. Sometimes they’re academic items, but more often than not, they’re not.
On the other hand, I do tend to blog as a way to keep links handy for later reference. It reminds me of what I was thinking about when I approached the material at first. Those can be academic, especially if they come through academic mailing-lists, but they’re often ideas which connect to my research interests in some ways.
Reading notes, to me, are different. I tend to take notes on my Clié, with page numbers. I can then search through my Clié for a specific idea I was thinking about. I also take a lot of notes about different projects, usually linking them in different ways. Instead of sorting my references, I prefer to search through them. After moving 19 times since December 2000, I wish I had all my books and articles online.
Reference managers can be very useful and some of them are getting to feel a bit like social bookmarking. For instance, RefWorks is online (so you always have access to your citation data) and you can share those references publicly. In fact, you can even use RSS, comment on the references, and have some tagging “descriptors.” What’s more, there’s a RefGrab-It bookmarklet to help you insert references from webpages you visit. Especially useful if people use DOI.
In terms of database design, tagging is almost a revolution. In fact, the “Web 2.0” concept has a fair bit to do that information may be non-hierarchical because you can tag instead of taxonomise (as in “classify in a taxonomy-style hierarchy of paradigmatic concepts”). Of course, your tags can be in a taxonomy. But they don’t need to be. And the taxonomy can be completely ad hoc (yes, yes, “folksonomy” is the term used for those ad hoc taxonomies). Think Technorati and the benefits of tagging blog entries (which explains why my WordPress.com “categories” are really thought of as Technorati tags).
As for bookshelves… Mine are well-disorganised. I still wish I had everything online instead of having to go through shelves, all the time.
My Mac desktops have always been known to represent chaos, to other people. Yet I could always find what I was looking for, and I would only resort to folder hierarchies for very broad classifications (academic texts vs. homebrewing resources, for instance, though I still plan on publishing on homebrewing culture). Different courses usually have their own folders but folders for current courses were usually on my desktop and I would move between different things by using the outline view. Searching was always very efficient and Spotlight almost makes folders irrelevant. Metadata elements are more powerful than any folder hierarchy. Even the Piles interface is less needed now. Especially since desktop files and database items (including email messages) are integrated in the same search.
Having switched to a PC, I tend to have a harder time making my way through things, for several reasons. Cramps my style. I can’t be as “chaotic” as I used to be. Yes, there are “Desktop search” solutions. But they just don’t do it for me. And the lack of a high-quality outliner makes my life less fun than it was with OmniOutliner. I’m slowly discovering OneNote but it’s not the ideal solution to repurpose data.
So I end up keeping many things online. Especially on Gmail, actually. Or in Technorati-tagged blog entries. Or in del.icio.us. Or in Zoho documents (looking forward to Zoho Notebook!). Or in Refworks.
Well, to be perfectly honest. Many things I tend to keep in Scrapbook, with the firm intention of going back to them if I ever get a chance. I never do. I also use browser tabs as reminders that I should do something with specific pages. But I eventually end up keeping them on the back burner anyway.
Ah, well…