NMC Campus Observer

Tagging Us A Resource Collection

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jun 4, 2006 11:52pm

In anticipation of our ramping up to an active summer schedule, we continue to add new features to the NMC Campus Observer. Our latest add-on takes advantage of the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. This free, web based, social software allows us to quickly add new web resources for those interested in Second Life and learning.

You can find our latest bookmarked sites at http://del.icio.us/nmc_campus. We are using the Javascript tools provided for free by del.icio.us to syndincate this information to the Observer. The “Links” button at the top of the screen will take you to a page that dynamically lists the 30 most recent resources added to our account.

Also, on the sidebar of the NMC Campus Observer web site, towards the lower end, you will find a section titled Second Life Tag Cloud. The words seen here represent that “tags” applied to describe our sites, and this tag cloud provides a navigational tool to narrow in on resources by category– the bigger the font size, the more numbers of resources you will find. For example, clicking on education takes you to all the sites we’ve tagged of interest to educators and Second Life, while the link for programming leads to a list of more technical web sites.

And if you have an account on del.icio.us, you can already easily bookmark sites in your own collection, and you can “send” a suggestion to use by simply tagging a new sites as for:nmc_campus.

It works like this. Let’s say I am bookmarking a page I found in New World Notes, an article on Your Tube, Your Imagination, about some new examples of videos created in Second Life are appearing in different web video collections. First as I am adding my own tags, I add a new tag, for:nmc_campus:

When the person who maintains the NMC Campus del.icio.us account checks their “links for you” collection, they see this new resource:

Then they can add it by simply clicking the “save this” link, and then the account will now contain a new bookmark to the site that was recommended to us.

Anyone who uses del.icio.us can now suggest new sites to us as they tag their own interesting web sites.

Story filed under: Resources & Information

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)