A paper by Cormac Lawler "...looks at aspects of Wikipedia's structure and process, with specific focus on its community (or organisational) learning." The insights are relevant to both education and learning organisations. Wikipedia is viewed as a learning community composed of multilingual members aiming to achieve consensus via cross-cultural communication. Conflict is worked on collaboratively, encouraging the taking of 'multiple perspectives'. For anyone interested in productive team-based computer-mediated collaboration in a text-based medium, this is a 'must read'.

A very informative annotated comparison of social bookmarks was created by Brian Benzinger. Check it out! Benzinger has been involved in Web creations since age 11, he is now 18.

"CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading." This collaborative bookmarking service is multi-lingual and you can surf the many interesting tags easily. The tags on learning and collaboration yielded interesting papers.

Bertrand Russell

Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia pronounced free culture at the recent 'First International Wikimedia Conference' in Frankfurt.The idea of 'Ten Things That Will Be Free!' will change culture as we have known it. Very exciting prospects, worth a plough though!

Global Voices Online ensures that heteroglossia has a presence in the blogsphere.The voice of the 'other' amidst the ranking-Olympics (via D.Weinberger). It also has good resources for activism blogging, one of them is this guide to anonymous blogging.

Try this interactive Google search. The Google map directory comes up with a lot of imaginative map hacks.The 'new','top' and 'hot' listings are worth a cruise.

The topology of cyberspace visualises the web in different ways.

Tagsurf is a message board organised by tags derived from Flickr, Delicious and Technorati.Some of the many tags, such as social software can be discussed there.

Stephen Downes' 'How to be heard' is a very useful article for people planning a blog or running one. There are very good hints towards increasing your virtual presence. He gives advice about having a purpose/concept, labouring over content, designing well, providing rich media and marketing. I agree, that it is very important to have an initial concept for a blog, but also see enormous potential in playing with 'identity' and allowing the blog to morph within the universe of memes. The 'self' can then be surprised about the diversity of identities. 

Using the free social bookmarking service del.icio.us you can search by tags or search your account. The tags are now visualised by Vox delicii. Michael Migurski analysis the growth and decay of the 'mind-shares' represented by colours. The coloured stripes represent in almost real time the most popular sites by the users.The intro is worth a read for comprehension.You can also navigate via "Gainers", "Losers" and "Top Names". (Unfortunate titles in the ranking universe!) 'Graphing the mindshare of information' is seen to be a bottom-up activity. Here  you can see what delicious users are saying about the tool.

There is more on CollaborativeRank by the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "Del.icio.us users who bookmark helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently bookmarking those URLs) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their tagging will have greater influence on this search engine's rankings." There is a list of the 500 active 'Del.icio.us domain experts'. strong current made it to 339 (4.8.) but is down to a slack 16867 today. (Via Micro Persuasion)

Came across a book to get more organised without the imperative statements.The author lightens up the task with quotes and in a way they also sum up the basis of his approach:

The best way to predict the future is to create it (Peter Drucker)

There is no fun in having nothing to do. The fun is in having a lot to do and not doing it. (John Roper)

Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have. (Doris Mortman)

The other day I got a chain saw in the mail. Now I have to send chain saws to ten other people. The postage is gonna kill me. (Brian McKim)

My experience has shown me that life truly is a journey, and the less baggage we carry the easier the ride. (Wally Amos)

First you forget names, then you forget faces, the you forget to zip up your fly, and then you forget to unzip your fly. (Branch Rickey)

Organizing from the Right Side of the Brain, A Creative Approach to Getting Organized, Lee Silber, Thomas Dunne Books, 2004

"The landscape of social bookmarking tools is like the wild west." Users who would like to make the right choices should consult bookmark comparisons before they invest their resources into one or a couple of options. "ConsultantCommons provides an online collaboration space and community for non-profit technical assistance providers to collaboratively build and share knowledge." Their article (print version) investigates the functionalities and examples of usage of the ever evolving bookmarking systems.Their primary selection criteria is, that the service should be compatible with nonprofit communities of practice.The commentries add further more services. One noteworthy one is a matrix (pdf) by Thorsten Rox comparing 11 major providers in July 2005.

(via Kairosnews)

Yahoo released its database of 50 million audio files for you to search. Feedmarker is a free web based RSS/Atom aggregator and bookmarks manager using tags.Their blog has more detail.Kinja is a blog portal that lets you collect news and commentary, but you can also track your favourite blog authors via your personal digest.

Athabasca University specialises in distance education and innovations in learning.They feature a chart of online collaborative tools. Various a/synchronous, text-based, A/V tools and CMS are evaluated. It displays these as products ,or as reports.They aim to utilise mainly free collaborative social software.

A dissertation on Teaching and Learning with ICT aims to contribute to "the ongoing change process in Europe's Higher Education in general...and change at the teacher training...in particular". "So far, the paradigm has been that teachers need to be taught as they are supposed to teach. The dilemma of bringing teachers and teacher students to a new didactic method, like the integration of ICTs, is in the fact that they themselves have been taught in plenary, discursive, non-ICT supported ways."  (UNESCO, 2004)

Search
Talk Digger searches various search engines to see who is linking to your blog. Podscope searches for the spoken word - on podcasts.

Bookmark/Tag
Facetious provids rationalised navigation of the many delicious bookmarks. It features the tags, the creators and sites.
Common Times is a del.icio.us - like social bookmarker that aggregates news articles you choose.The tool is collaborative tag-cloud generating.There is more detail on their blog.
Flickr's 'interesting' tag shows some unusual photos!