Etmooc Icon 2

My head is throbbing a wee bit trying to keep up with what is going on in etmooc. Lots of interesting stuff not quite connecting up here. I’ve not manage along to one live session yet, but have watch some of the replays available on Archive | #ETMOOC and listen to some more by recording from the replays.

Collecting

T0S3 – Introduction to Social Curation w/ Jeffery Heil (Jan 17, 12pm) was interesting. I’ve been collecting links, originally in delicious now in pinboard.

Delicious

I had a fair number of folk in my Delicious network and found it a very useful resource. At one time I used to get a fair number of links and send them out using the for:username tag. I am not sure why that died out in my circles. I also subscribed to the links from my network in my RSS reader. This became less useful when folk started pushing their tweets to delicious automatically.

I started using pinboard when it looked like Delicious might shut down and have kept using it. At some point in the past I’ve looked at various other tools, but preferred delicious/pinboard style simplicity. It also has an API which lets you do really interesting things. After listen to Jeffery I might try Diigo again. I have a tendency to prefer simple presentation and some sort of automation.

Sharing

Given the huge number of links, list etc that are now online I am not sure if it very valuable just sharing links beyond a quick tweet unless we add some value. I very much like the link blog style, for example Stephen Downes or, the not educational, Daring Fireball. I read both in an RSS reader. Daring Fireball is particularly good in the way the posts link points to the original post he quotes rather than his own post and the quote is clearly defined. Sometime I am not sure on a quick glance what is quote and what is Stephen Downes.

I don’t think that this sort of blogging needs a lot of text from the blogger but as Stephen Downes and John Gruber show it needs a great deal of thinking to work really well. I occasionally make this sort of post for example, Zero Privacy or Connections and hope to develop both a workflow and a way of adding value rather than being just an echo.

I used the etmooclogo by Adam Lark (remix from Alec Couros) under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

On Thursday there was a fair bit of tweeting about delicious shutting down. TechCrunch blogged Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? (this post is now updated).

The first thing I did was backup my delicious links.

I’ve got several years worth of delicious links so was a wee bit worried. I also prefer delicious to any other system for saving links I’d seen. It is simple, the interface is clean, the network is useful without turning into another social thing and the API and scripts are useful. I have also used the delicious tools to display sets of links on various webpages (quite a lot in glow) which I don’t want to hunt down and change.

There have been a lot of suggestions for delicious replacements Diigo seems to be a favourite. I looked at this a while ago and, for reasons I can quite recall (probably lack of simplicity), I didn’t stick with it, although a lot of education folk use it. I downloaded Scuttle again and though about setting this opensource delicious like site up but I’ve not done so yet.

Delicious Pinboard

Yesterday I signed up for pinboard this cost about £5 to signup which I hope will mean the service will not go away. I imported my exported delicious link.

I choose pinboard mainly for its delicious like simplicity and the fact it supports the delicious API.

Today things look a little brighter for delicious: delicious blog » What’s Next for Delicious? but I am quite happy to have paid my fiver. I’ve set pinboard to add any new links I post to delicious and set up an email address to post links from my phone. There looks like there are a few more useful features to explore later. I’ll keep using delicious at the moment and see how things go. It is, I feel, a good thing to get occasional reminders about our reliance on free services and to get the opportunity to pay for ones we really need.

Rss From Noun

A while back I noticed More Code Fun: Reading (or ‘to Read’) List – CogDogBlog which pointed to Reading: keeping on top of stuff I save | Helpful Technology The site has a nice byline Digital innovation for people with more sense than money when I grabbed the code to create my reading list.

My reading list pulls together various RSS feeds: my delicious, things live starred in google reader, instapaper & instapaper. I read my google reader and twitter on my phone. I don’t always want to follow the links so star or favourite them for later consumption. The reading list. pulls all of these together. Easy to use and I like the way it combines existing services rather than needing a new one. I’ll easily be able to add other feeds if I want to later on.

This week’s harvest

  • Print With Any Printer From iPad, iPhone – Wired How-To Wiki
    Which I am keeping for later reference. I’ve not felt the need to print from my iPhone in over 2 years of use or from an iPad. In fact I got rid of my home printer a couple of weeks ago (still networked to my wife’s B&W one) because it was gathering dust.
  • I registered for Skype Education as it looks as if it might be interesting.
  • Of the many What to do when you can’t get to school for pupils blog posts Primary Bits and Bytes » Blog Archive » Snow Place Like Home was my favourite, probably because of

    “REMEMBER! Real snow is the best! You should only really be here if you get too cold or fed up with playing out, snowballing or building snowmen!”

  • OOo4Kids looks like it will be worth checking out at work.
  • My Adobe Connect Recipe – CogDogBlog looks very useful for the time that Glow moves to Adobe Connect for video conferencing.
  • I am having an interesting conversation in the glow forums (login required) about video in glow blogs, this provides some food for thought: HTML5 Video Player | VideoJS it amazes me how complicated getting video onto the web is, formats, browsers etc. As someone who doesn’t understand these things it seems to me that the new html5 video tag could surely support more than one video format per browser and clean the whole thing up.
  • yesterday I linked to the NounProject on twitter this collects, organises and adds to the highly recognisable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way. The symbols on this site are and always will remain free.

RSS image from used under NounProject Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported

Delicious Applescript Blog

A while back I stopped splicing my daily delicious links into my RSS feed via FeedBurner, a couple of folk told me they did not find it very helpful. I’ve been wondering if a weekly list would be of interest?

To make it a little simpler I made a AppleScript that downloads the RSS from my delicious links, creates some html and posts it here using the MetWeblogAPI. It is not an elegant bit of code but I’ve put it up on my wiki: week in delicious in case anyone wold find it useful. It would be easy to tweak for a different number of days or just to pickup a particular tag.

I am not sure if I am going to use it, if I do I’ll probably only post a particular tag but I could not resist the temptation for a little auto blogging.

The script could be changed for other autoblogging tasks too. I’ve put it with few other Apple Scripts that I find occasionally useful on the Wiki.