joeclark's blog

Posted more about this on my personal blog (be sure to see the posts about EduPunk and Tag Galaxy as well).

The new ExitReality plugin extrudes every webpage into 3D, and page owners can customize the 3D elements. Visitors appear as customizable avatars and can chat with each other. Certain services have preset "room" designs, such as the nightclub look for MySpace profiles or the art gallery design for Flickr pages.

Worth a look! So far, it's Windows-only.

A number of SL users will be attending the Spring ELI focus session on Virtual Learning Environments, and there will probably be back-channel interactions going on in SL during the conf.  Nick Noakes has created a wikipage where you can connect with other SLers who will be there in one avatar or another.

These days articles about tagging often repeat an image of Monk-like librarians freaking out about the rise of folksonomic classification.  One imagines uniformed order-obsessed Gruppen-Kataloguers peering out of a fortress window and muttering about the rabble in the courtyard below.  "Zey need our help," one chuckles, leeringly, fondling a weapon.

As satisfyingly as that may reinforce the stereotypes of some commentators, I'm not sure how accurate it is.

Witness a couple of recent blog entries that take an analytical look the tagging phenom and come up with good news:

Technorati Profile

The above is something Technorati says is required to "claim" a blog. I couldn't figure another way to get the link onto my blog page!

I've recently encountered a couple of cool tools that can help make your site more interactive and current, on a budget, without driving your webmaster insane.

Want to share a reading list with your audience, such as guides for classroom instruction, podcasting, etc.? LibraryThing is yet another social computing tool that lets you catalog books (ones you own or ones you want) online, organize them with tags, and share your reactions with others. It's incredibly easy to add books -- I had been using Amazon's wish list function to keep track of books on my wish list, and LibraryThing imports these! They also have a "bookmarklet" that lets you add any book you find on Amazon to your library list with one click.

Even cooler, they have a "widget" that you can put on any web site featuring random or selected books -- see an example on my

From the website:
I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by "picking up" and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.

More grist for the Wikipedia trashers: a report in a Massachusetts newspaper disclosing the fact that congressional staffers have been editing entries to "correct" unfavorable information. Not much of a surprise there (though Nature did recently publish the results of a study showing Wikipedia to be about as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica, so I'm not giving up on Wikipedia yet).

But I wonder if Wikipedia's open-editing process can be used to more openly track historical revision?

Two more new tools to explore. I signed up for Backpack and 43 Things. The latter has people and places variants as well; you list the places you want to go (Hawaii, Sneads), the things you want to do (lose weight, skydive), and the people you want to meet (Ian Anderson, Paul Reubens), and the software puts you in touch with people who have the same dreams -- as well as those who have BTDT.

Backpack is one of oodles of online storage tools using Ajax tech. I'm already experimenting with online image storage (and have been for almost a year), so I figure why not do this with lists and notes to self?

Both tools seem promising in terms of ready access to information you want at your fingertips. I wish I'd had an online project-management gizmo when I was restoring that 1971 Westfalia Camper a few years ago. Nothing like a PERT chart to help you focus on a million overlapping

Basecamp is a nice lightweight project-management tool from the same folks who brought you Backpack and, more recently, the group chat tool Campfire. Smart interfaces, thoughtful features, applicable functionality.

Though I don't think it uses the word "folksonomy" anywhere, this article in eSchool News contains -- if you can wade through the gee-whiz style -- a couple of neat ideas for application of tagging tools in the classroom. The examples are provided by K-12 educators but could easily be adapted to any instructional context.

I'm slowly catching up with what all the cool people already know about:

• Openomy gives you free online storage organized by tag instead of directory
• Ma.gnolia may be giving del.icio.us a run for its money
• PXN8 lets you edit images online for free
• YouTube is yet another free online video locker
• Surveymonkey gives you free online survey tools
• Lulu may be the ultimate in vanity publishing (besides any webmonkey with a text editor and an FTP account, of course - or a weblog)

One wonders how much mindshare will be available for university e-portals, such as  Blackboard's.  In addition to old standards like My Yahoo, a couple of Ajax-based personal portal tools are really sharp and intuitive, especially for the blog-savvy feedster:

• Pageflakes
  
• Netvibes

The latter appeals to me more, though the former has a tabbed interface like Blackboard's.

And of course, both easily allow you to show del.icio.us bookmarks and tag clouds, as well as your latest Flickr pix.

Test of Odeo's phone-in audio recording service, part of their free package of tools.

A similar service is Springdoo, another Ajaxy web-audio tool, but with a neat angle: "speak your email" and Springdoo will stream it to a web address contained in an email message you send out. The address is permanent and so can be linked from another web page for repeated access.

Both provide a handy way of publishing audio for online courses & archives.