Wow! web 2.0 is really here
15th February, 2007
It’s astonishing, you take your eyes off your browser for 10 minutes and suddenly most of the tools you dreamed of 6 months ago are there, and working, and available for free! I have spent the past few days digging through the amazing (and rapidly growing) Go2web2 directory.
In particular the dandelife timeline caught my eye. I have been on the look out for a web based portfolio tool to use as a carrier for a digital CV for ages and nothing I have seen so far has inspired me but I like this tool very much. It’s a very usable mash-up that aggregates media from other sites. It has tagging and people links and I have subsequently discovered several different timeline views. I opened up some of my stories to public view and then got quite excited that other people were instantly looking in, someone even linked to me as a buddy!
Because dandelife links to, rather than stores data, I need somewhere to store all my media online. I already have a free YouTube account for video and a free Flickr account for photos. By the way Flickr now has a Google earth map view for your photos so you can present your portfolio geographically - very nice and makes you think about a whole new way of telling your story.
The problem is that neither of these libraries do sound very well. Go2web to the rescuce. Check out Clickcaster which seems to do for sound what Flickr and YouTube do for photos and video, with the added benefit that it will also record directly from within the web page, and make your sound files into podcasts, excellent stuff! While searching for clickcaster I stumbled across chinswing which is an asynchronous audio message board, sort of voxpop meets gaffitti.
I still have a bunch of text based documents I need to get online and e-snips is an interesting solution, in fact it may be the best single hosting solution for all the data although the 1GB limit would soon be an issue. It’s certainly great for PDFs and I have put up copies of a number of reports which like dandelife have already attracted a number of views just by being there and tagged. I like the way YouTube and e-snips present a list of similarly tagged items for you to explore every time you look at something. I also like that e-snips will record a sound or video comment, rather than just text to add to any item.
Futurelab is always looking for ideas. Find out how you can 
Bob Harrison
Ben Williamson
Dan Sutch
Richard Sandford
Leon Cych
Martin Owen
Tim Reader
February 16th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Great links Tony - there are some amazing tools that are so widely available now and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting lots of teachers and students who are playing with them in and out of their classrooms. I’m putting together stories of their use for learning so would be happy to hear more about where other people know of their uses.
February 16th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Spot on, Tony. So now what we need is the education web 2.0 directory with social bookmarking by educationalists and a tagging/voting system so those of us desperately trying to keep up with the avalanche of wonderful new apps can share our learning and reviewing collaboratively online…
Anyone good at mash-ups…?
February 16th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day, Tony P (other than the great post, Tony W! :o).
It sounds like something that would not be amiss on this very blog. What do you think? - or should it have its own home?
Either way, if such a tool doesn’t already exist, I’ll put my mind to it as soon as I’ve finished the FL redesign =]
February 16th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Tony -
Glad you like Dandelife. I’ve been enjoying your stories there. I’m particularly flattered that you picked us to comment on out of the hundreds on the go2web2 site.
I don’t know if you’ve been able to unlock these features successfully or not, but Dandelife ’syncs’ with your flickr and youtube streams as well. You can import content from those sites into your Dandelife, as it were. In a few weeks there will be more automatic synchronization, so there’s not as much work needed to turn your data dispersed over the ‘net into something a little more.
OK, enough from me now. Good work on your blog. If there’s anything I can do to make Dandelife a better place, please don’t hesitate to say so.
Thrive,
Kelly
Co-Founder of Dandelife.com
February 16th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
This is something that we’re integrating into the Map of Innovation that we are developing at the moment (thanks for the prompt Tony P!!) So please do make suggestions for use and content. As Tony P said in his comment - this could be a really useful, educationalist driven resource.
February 16th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Flickr uses Yahoo Maps not Google.
February 16th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
http://www.diino.com offer 2GB of storage I believe.
February 17th, 2007 at 12:37 am
Thanks Tony! Very nice sites! Dandelife is pretty cool, I’ll have to spend some more time with it later. I read about another site you might like in PC Mag this month called http://www.Mediafire.com
It’s free and unlimited online storage, might help with those text docs :)
February 17th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Is Web 2.0 really that important? I don’t really feel it is going to make a big deal of difference.
February 17th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Web2.0 is just a buzzword with no meaning or relevance. Go ahead and shout it as much as you want, the hype is dying down. Lame useless sites pop up here and there but they will go away…Only people like you (who don’t see past the next week) care for all the teen/geek trends.
February 17th, 2007 at 2:59 am
Dandelife.com is a horrible website.
They moderate all the blogs and are a lot more restrictive than all other forums ive been to whilst sporting giant ads all over the page.
February 18th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Gosh an interesting flurry of responses, here are some further thoughts.
I don’t really care what you call it or which social networking tools you choose to use, the important thing is that a significant group of young people are familiar with this stuff, mirrored alarmingly by the significant group of teachers who are not. Tony P and Dan are right we do need to use the systems themselves to share our collective experiences, my worry is that the majority of teachers are not yet looking in this direction at all, and the (other) digital divide (between children and teachers) just keeps growing even wider and more difficult to join up.
I tried to profile Flickr and ArtPad on a Teachers TV resource review recently and despite 2 attempts I believe we fell foul of the lawyers who saw both products as too risky. I increrasingly think we need a Jamie Oliver type series on mainstream TV looking at the growing missed opportunities that we all know exist right now, but most teachers do not know about, and most kids do, but do not make the connection to education.
To Kelly I am flattered that you picked up this blog and am collating a wishlist of stuff I would want in my digital portfolio. It is not specific to dandelife and perhaps if we opened another posting here we could encourage others to contribute.
Here are 2 instant challenges. First my recent fiddling around in several different systems means I am replicating tags all over the place. I really want one site online to store and organise these, which like my photos and videos I can mash into all the other sites where I store and display stuff. At the moment this is a messy inspiration file on my hard disk. Second I want my tags to display like a contextual word cloud, or in some other way than loads of lists.
Answers on a postcard please…
February 19th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Having read the article and comments, it appears that Web 2.0 remains something to monitor and experience. One can never be sure what may develop from it. Perhaps nothing, perhaps something useful, perhaps something big.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:40 am
I’ve been experimenting with various collaboration & document sharing tools and have discovered an excellent site. It is a very user friendly, web-based application that is well worth taking the time to explore. Take a few minutes and look at Projjex.com. The tutorials are excellent & you don’t need to be a Rocket Scientist to figure out how to use it. It even offers a free version so you can try it on for size.