Diigo V3 Social Bookmarking and more

My guess is that most people reading this blog have been using an online bookmarking system such as Del.icio.us for quite a while now. It is a great way to organise sites you visit and categorise them with tags. You can also find friends tags and share bookmarks.
I would like you to consider a newcomer ( well sort of - it has open to the general publicquite recently, but was around in 2007) - it's DiigoV3.
Diigo V3 gives an extra dimension to social bookmarking by enabling communities to grow around topics.

In other words the bookmarking is the same, but you have the added dimension of a social networking facility built into the Diigo environment.
Diigo themselves on their blog have got a bit worried about whether Diigo is will become too much like other social networks where it simply becomes a way to find your friends online and continue the conversation. Diigo seems to come at things from the completely opposite angle, in fact you find groups through what you are reading ( blogs etc) and bookmarking, the chance is then to discuss the issues that are relevant to you.

The other major advantage among many is that it is not the type of instant hit that some social networking addicts are craving, as a result it appears to be developing some interesting communities around educational themes.
It also means that you can have your social bookmarking and your networking group in one place on the web cutting down the searching around.... definitely worth considering, as usual the sign up takes seconds.
Another site which is useful and slanted more towards business networking however it also has a large edtech community would be LinkedIn. Within the LinkedIn site you start off by building your profile, which involves describing the things that interest you or work related areas. Once you have done this your profile becomes a little like your calling card, you can also find current friends/colleagues in the LinkedIn education community and join in the discussions.Others to consider ( for balance ) would be something like Pownce Where you can form communities, chat and share files.
There is also Jaiku, which has just joined the Google stable, I guess we will be hearing more about Jaiku soon! However the group here get away a little from the notion that I began with, that of using bookmarking as a means of forming communities online.

One very important thing to do and one that in my haste I often forget, is to tag your 'stuff' in some way. There was a parallel discussion going on within online communities about developing rubrics for tagging, I don't know if the issue was ever resolved, perhaps if someone who was involved would like to let me know I can add the results of the discussions to this post.

Social Networking Update

I tagged onto my previous rant on Social Networking a link to a Channel 4 (UK) news item from Thursday 30th August, which is about employers beginning to ban the use of social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace from the workplace - I feel that this is a bit like King Canute trying to stop the tide - look out there's a big wave coming!!!!

I am gradually warming to Facebook, while self restricting my access to it ( Twitter seems to be running in the background though!).

I was reading Graham Attwell's article re the usefulness of some of the widgets available in Facebook and yes some are shall we say politely 'less than useful', but some are great and lead me to use FaceBook more and more as a 'One Stop Shop' aggregator some of the more useful add ons for me would be :

* Skype online

* My Blogs - a widget which shows the titles of new posts from friends blogs

* Del.icio.us - a great widget which allows you to switch to your Del.iciou.us page

* Twittervision - a widget which works on your own contact list

* YouTube - a widget which allows you to play YouTube vids in your space

* Friend finder - a great way to find if your e-mail list friends are also on FaceBook

and the latest which is thanks to Graham ,

* Zoho Online Office - a widget which allows you from within facebook to view shared files and upload new files to your Zoho account.

These are fab attachments which added to the constant updating of friends data makes it a must in order to keep 'in the mix'. A good example of how our kids are using FaceBook - my eldest daughter Sian came back from a few days in Paris yesterday evening and immediately downloaded all of the pictures from her mobile phone to FaceBook for all of her friends to see, they have posted theirs thus giving the group of 7 kids who went a vast library of images of their experiences..... 21st Century who needs old fashioned photographs??



As you can see from this post, my panic about constant online time in Social Networking is beginning to ease (or am I coming more under its spell?) - it was a timely thought as others such as Karyn Romeis is also looking into the use of the Social Networking Phenomenon.... I think that I am going out into the 'real world' now .............. not quite sure, as the line are a bit blurred between the two :)

facebook
karyn romeis

The Blogosphere is continuing to develop new 'watering holes' where bloggers can feel 'at home', the latest is Twitter. It has become 'the place' to keep in contact with friends and colleagues around the globe. You communicate via Tweets ( short 140 character messages) which you either use to instigate a conversation or to further a current discussion. As with all other Web 2.0 tools there is a way to 'know' what is going on at Twitter (ask someone), when I at first arrived at my Twitter page I thought 'Great!!!!! a bit like Second Life - I have no contacts here!!!!' , and as usual I couldn't see the point as I wasn't in any discussion at all!!!!! ( is it me???).
However Edublogger friend to the rescue, with the solution - easy add all of her friends to your page (plus add some of their friends) and 'Hey Presto' you suddenly have an interesting group of new friends (Yay) - so to anyone out there looking for a way into Twitter ( use pj23harry's friends list to create your own friendship group.
Twitter has the extra dimension of being able to use mobile phones ( hey we might just have hit upon a use for mobiles in the classroom to promote language skills ( well 140 characters does necessitate brevity!!). You can Tweet and recieve Tweets to your mobile once you set it up - freedom from the computer.
While I personally find keeping up with my Ning Social Netowork can be tedious on occasions - I have to go and find stuff!!!! Twitter as in all good aggregators brings all of my conversations to me - wherever I am (on a mobile phone or computer)..... if you haven't tried it yet - go on give it a whirl - it does become addictive though so beware ;-)
Happy Tweeting

p.s. You can also use Twitter from within Second Life - which I think makes for better communication.