• Diggdot.us – digg / slashdot / del.icio.us popular :: Meta meta meta
• MyBlogLog :: Invisible outgoing click tracking for your blog. Slick. I’d like to see this as a plugin!

The CollaborativeRank project reveals some very interesting information about del.icio.us users and tags. A couple of functions I find most interesting:

• Searching for a tag such as origami provides a list based on popularity of items, kind of a Google PageRank for links.

• If there are enough users, it will also reveal ‘experts’ for a tag, such as this search for paper (look for the experts just under the search box)

• The ‘experts’ idea goes further, though, and this is most interesting to me because I believe it represents the inevitable direction of this kind of social networking and resource sharing. Use a ‘via’ search to find experts related to your tags. For instance, this search for via:fncll reveals the top 10 users who bookmarked the same links I did before I did. Fascinating. I’m very curious about the percentages of recriprocal experts. For instance, one of my experts is Doug and I am one of his experts. Interestingly, while most of our expert lists differ, I find a lot of value in his experts as well. That is a valuable tree of information to explore.

CollaborativeRank does some other things too… check it out!

[ruminate delicious tagging socialnetworks influence experts]

In Slate: The Rules of Distraction

But when Cornell University researchers outfitted classrooms with wireless Internet and monitored students’ browsing habits, they concluded, “Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there’s a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades.” It seems a bit of a stretch to impute a causal relationship, but it’s certainly possible that the kind of brain that can handle multiple channels of information is also the kind of brain that earns A’s.

I’ve long since given up even worrying about students surfing or checking their mail during the class (unless they are distracting other students). I would definitely welcome more research in this area!

[ruminate edtech wireless classroom]

Google Base was much more interesting to me as a concept than it is an idea in practice. With very limited facility for tagging and access through tags and a 31 day maximum lifespan for information stored in the base, it is clearly much more a tool for marketing than what I had hoped it would be: a highly-reliable, free, tagging, searchable, free-form database tool. At this point, for my purposes, it’s just a manual search booster. Whoopee.

[ruminate googlebase google base]

• RSSxl Beta – RSS Generator :: Create an RSS feed for pages that don’t yet have one

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]

• What’€™s on your mind? – Simmery :: Interesting questions, thoughtful answers. Hmmm…

• Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools :: A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true… stuff that is extraordinary, better than similar products, little-known, and reliably useful for an individual or small group.