There is a message thread on one of my other social bookmarking networks asking:
What is social bookmarking?
What are the advantages of using the XYZ network?
I've been a member of XYZ since 2007, so I've experienced the entire realm of features that are available. I've also been a proponent of the positive nature of the sociability of the XYZ web application in the past.
I will say that it has been an excellent way to bookmark information that I gather. Fortunately, I always backup my bookmarks to del.icio.us.
In earlier versions of XYZ, there seemed to be much more open access to find and friend other people, but that is no longer the case.
Now, you are ALLOWED to only follow 30 more people than you friend. That would be OK, if people actually focused on that aspect, ie friending, but many aren't yet. XYZ doesn't provide anything like a friend alert in your profile, so people don't focus on the friending component.
Many new to XYZ don't understand the social aspects of the web application. Typically, it may take months for a person to recognize the importance of this friending feature.
I hope that XYZ will use a more moderate approach to preventing spam and SEO issues. I have several suggestions for Sandy_XYZ (the new bot). Email me.
The inability to friend new people has been a point of contention among some XYZ users for almost a year now, so I don't see that issue going away...that is central to being social.....friending and being friended.
There are some other aspects of XYZ, such as highlighting, that are different than del.icio.us, yet other similar sites have those capabilities, and they don't prevent you from friending others.
I do like the capability of having webslides of our lists, but that's not really a social aspect.
Starting and maintaing the WORDLE group was very exciting, until I could no longer friend new members. I find the group feature loses its appeal when the group is just a collection of unconnected people's bookmarks. It's no longer social.
I'm hoping that people who want to be social won't continue to be penalized for those who complain about being spammed. Since the squeaky wheel gets the grease, I'll continue to squeak for a return to friending.....the most social part of social bookmarking.
I saw these images and had to share them. The tiniest are just over 1mm. That's amazing.
We, the government should not be paying private insurance companies to continue to poorly perform and overcharge customers. If WE, the government want quality health care, WE, the government, will need to build the mechanisms to make it happen.
Listen to this eye opening video.
Here is another wonderful example of how people are leveling the playing field for podcasters. You don't have to have expensive hardware or software to level the volume of all participants in your podcast.
Just use THE LEVELATOR!
This wonderful software takes your podcast or other audio file and changes the audio levels, so various speakers' words are at the same volume.
This is quite a game changer. Try it out on Windows, OSX, or Linux(Ubuntu) So what is The Levelator®? It's software that runs on Windows, OS X (universal binary), or Linux (Ubuntu) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It's not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It's much more than those tools, and it's much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler's application window, and a few moments later you'll find a new version which just sounds better. |
The Levelator® is brought to you by: |
| Bruce and Malcolm Sharpe (core code) |
| Norman "the Normanizer" Lorrain (UI code) |
| Russell Heistuman (graphic design) |
| Doug Kaye (concept and fearless leader) |
This song, Flume, that NPR covers is awesome. It was a great opportunity to hear a rock icon as he adapts his ideas and accentuates his positive views of newer rock. | On paper, it's a fool's errand: Peter Gabriel, a 60-year-old icon with one of the most distinctively dusky voices in rock, gets down with the young folk by covering the songs of Arcade Fire, Radiohead and Bon Iver, alongside tributes to peers such as Neil Young, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Randy Newman and others. Scratch My Back ought to be the ultimate in inessential vanity projects — an album-length love letter to a star's impeccably curated record collection — but it flat-out isn't. Instead, it actually does what it's supposed to do; namely, do right by both the singer and his source material. |
| Remarkably, Gabriel unlocks a new dimension of "Flume." Where Vernon spent an entire album looking inward, Gabriel takes one of its most unassuming gems and locates its grandiosity; for all its plaintive, slow-motion searching, Gabriel's take builds into something ambitious and bold and, well, breathtaking.Read more at www.npr.org |
There is an excellent slideshow and a discussion of standards that could be expected from those beginning to learn how to teach. Next week I begin a new gig as the tutor taking a group of pre-service teachers titled Teaching with New Technologies. This will be quite a challenge as much of the content has been decided by the lecturers in charge of the course. In preparation for this task I have been paying even more attention to resources that I might share with the group of students I will be working with. It was great to find in the twitterstream reference then to this presentation from Steve Wheeler from the University of Plymouth. |
| Paying reference to the need for individualised learning, Steve explores a hierarchy of trends in education before looking at self-organised learning and where Web 2.0 tools fit in this process.Read more at johnp.wordpress.com |
Karl Malone correctly, in my view, put this gun incident in proper perspective. It's wrong, and it's the worst incident that has ever happened to the NBA and it's reputation.
I believe that this incident proclaims the nonexistence of the brain's executive function. This is the part of the brain that controls impulsive, dangerous behaviors. Only someone with immature impulses could have done this.
It's too bad, Gilbert Arenas didn't ask someone with a more mature sense of self-control how to keep his guns appropriately away from his children.
It seems to me that Karl Malone had a good idea of using a safe...OR he could put them in a safety deposit box. He certainly didn't need to put them in a public place where POTENTIALLY other children might find them. I'm hoping that the NBA will help provide the NBA players involved in the incident with some lessons in properly storing guns. It may be too late, but it's worth the effort. | Former NBA star Karl Malone is an avid hunter who publicly declared his advocacy of the right to bear arms by becoming a spokesman for the National Rifle Association. SI.com asked Malone for his thoughts on the situation involving three-time All-Star Gilbert Arenas, who acknowledged Monday that he stored unloaded guns at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., and said he displayed them in front of Wizards teammate as "a misguided effort to play a joke." |
| All the years I played, I've never heard of anything like this alleged incident or of a player bringing guns into the locker room. Doing that in the locker room, with so much that can happen? It's one of those things you just don't do. I can't make any sense of that. You can't tell me one good thing that can happen with a gun in an arena, but I can tell you a thousand bad things. |
| If I'm a player on that team, of course, I'm saying to those guys, "What the hell are you doing?" |
Crisfield sounds like one of the small towns from James Michener's novel Chesapeake. I think it would be an excellent destination if traveling near Maryland. I wonder if they still have oysters there, or if the area is polluted like so much of the bay? | The Crisfield Heritage Foundation |
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| The Crisfield Heritage Foundation is committed to preserving the heritage of Crisfield and its environs, to educate the public concerning this heritage, and to provide local information thus serving as the central hub around which tourism in the Crisfield area revolves. |
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The City of Crisfield and the surrounding areas are among the richest in the State of Maryland for culture, heritage and tourist attractions. The Crisfield Heritage Foundation serves as an important source of information for tourist and visitors. Read more at www.crisfieldheritagefoundation.org |
Scientific Writing is set in stone, in such a manner that it hasn't even been disturbed by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web.
All other forms of publishing and commerce has been affected, but not science publishing. I think that speaks volumes for the fact that scientific publishing is an edifice that stands in the same place as other sacrosant "institutions, such as "religions and kingdoms".
Can it be disrupted? I doubt it. Looking back on 2009, there was one particular note that seemed to sound repeatedly, resonating through the professional discourse at conferences and in posts throughout the blogosphere: the likelihood of disruptive change afoot in the scientific publishing industry. |
It has occurred to me, however, that I would likely have agreed with arguments that scientific publishing was about to be disrupted a decade ago—or even earlier. That we are speculating on the possibility of the disruption (here were are talking of “disruption” in the sense described by Clay Christensen in his seminal book The Innovator’s Dilemma) of scientific publishing in 2010 is nothing short of remarkable. |
| When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research |
| one could have reasonably predicted in 1991, however, was that scientific communication |
| —would radically change over the next couple decades. |
Tim Berners-Lee wants to "unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together." This should be revolutionary. | Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web |
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. Read more at www.ted.com |
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What is Social Bookmarking?
