I just came across two great resources which can help you make the most of social bookmarking with del.icio.us. The first is a fantastifc article The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users from Slacker Magazine. This article has some great tagging tips and also explains how to use some of del.icio.us more obscure features such as the inbox. All in all, a helpful read with plenty of useful tricks for both the beginner and experienced user. The second resource is Absolutely Del.icio.us, an extremely comprehensive list of del.icio.us tools. The list covers anything that you’ve every wanted to do with del.icio.us and more from how to search, post, and view bookmarks as well as how to integrate del.icio.us into your site and with other applications.
Originally published December 12, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I’m happy to report that today Yahoo announced that they have acquired del.icio.us, my absolute favourite social bookmarking service. I think that this will be a great boost for del.icio.us and was a very smart buy on Yahoo’s part. Not only can we expect faster access times to del.icio.us due to the added Yahoo server power, but I think that there is a tremendous potential for integration between Yahoo’s existing services especially in regards to tagging. How cool would it be to share tags between your bookmarks, blogs and pictures?
Thanks to the Social Software Weblog for being the first of my feeds to report the great news.
Originally published December 9, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
This is a nice article summarizing some of the best Firefox themes and extensions available to jazz up your browser. There were a few I’d heard of before such as Google Preview (which displays handy little thumbnail screenshots for your Google search results) and a few new ones as well, such as the IE-tab (which allows you to run IE in Firefox). I was hoping that the IE tab would save me from having to use IE on Windows PC to access one of the web applications that I use that requires Active X support, but unfortunately the IE tab doesn’t support Active X either. Still, the extension is handy to view those non-standards compliant but necessary web sites.
I should also mention that this article was found via digg.com, which also happens to be where I’m writing this post from using their very cool ‘blog this’ feature!
read more |Â digg story
Originally published December 9, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just created my very first Predict-A-Poll, a web site that allows you to create your own polls to share with others and to cast votes on a particular topic and to predict how other people will vote. The topic of this poll is about the current showdown between the top two technology news sites and was inspired by a friends pet project, digg vs dot, which helped to heat up the debate.
I just signed up for SuperGlu a web content aggregator that allows me to bring together the various RSS feeds that I produce and display them all in one place. My SuperGlu site contains my Flickr phots and tags, my various del.icio.us bookmarks, my 43 Places and 43 Things lists, and my most recently played tracks on last.fm as well as the feeds from this site, as well as Amy@MEdTech and Millimeters of Change. I must admit, it’s kind of a nice feeling to see all of my sepearate identities come together in once place. I like how it’s organized as a daily digest as it gives me a nice snapshot of my web activity for the day. Its also interesting to see all of my tags displayed in one place. So far my tags seem to mutally exclusive, but it will be interesting to see if my Flickr tags match up with my del.icio.us ones given my two very different uses for the applications.
The services is relatively new, and although I’ve only just signed up there are a few more features I’d l ike to see, such as:
- Flickr thumbnail images displayed in the sidebar, similar to how they are displayed in this blogs sidebar
- More template options, as there are currently only three and I ended up customizing the one I am currently using. Something simple and crisp, a la Kurbrick or K2 would be ideal
- Option to upload profile picture
- Option to change color of SuperGlu header that appears on every page, similar to customization options that Blogger allows
- Ability to add more source feeds, as the current limit is 11. This number seems rather arbitrary, and believe it or not, there are more that I want to add!
I’m writing this post from the blogging interface of Flock, a new Mozilla-based web browser which integrates social software technologies like blogging, RSS, Flickr and del.icio.us right into the browser interface. Not only can you write blog posts directly from the browser, but you can use the browser to post and view your del.icio.us bookmarks as well as read your RSS feeds.   Although you can do some of these things in Firefox using Bookmarklets and their RSS subscription feature, the added features and seamless integration that Flock provides makes these technologies that much easier to use.
Originally published October 21, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
The MEdTech Bookmark Manager is a tool which allows users to store bookmarks online, tag them, and share them with others. Not only are bookmarks stored in one easy to access place, but this application allows users to rate and comment on bookmarks, as well as choose to keep them private or share them with others. The bookmark manager was especially designed for medical students and faculty at Queen’s and contains several features not found in traditional social bookmarking applications, such as a thumbnail screen shot of the page you are bookmarking and the ability to rate your bookmarks and share these ratings with others.
The bookmark manager is accessible to all staff and faculty of the School of Medicine that have a MEdTech account. To begin using, simply log on to the MEdTech Bookmark Manager and begin adding bookmarks. For more information on how to import existing bookmarks from your browser and how to customize the bookmark manager visit the About page.
Originally published October 18, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
The MEdTech Academic Journal Directory is now live and is a listing of academic journals concerned with the use of technology in medical education. There over 40 journals listed by subject from educational technology to medical informatics and each journal is described in terms of thier target audience and topic areas.
Originally published October 17, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
Earlier this summer I was playing around with Tiddlywiki and after a few hours of experimentation I came up with Wiktionary, a wiki of web technology terms which I just posted to the MEdTech Labs site.
Although I was impressed with the original and lightweight version of TiddlyWiki, I choose to implement Wiktionary using MyWiki, a server-side offshot of TiddlyWiki. Wiktionary stores the definitions as pieces of mircocontent (or tiddlers) just like TiddlyWiki does but writes the data to a file on the server as opposed to a local HTML file. This allows for the wiki to persist over time and supports multiple contributions, all accomplished without the overhead of a database or a single page refresh.
Wiktionary and MyWiki are just two of many adaptations of the ever versatile TiddlyWiki. For more information on adaptations to TiddlyWiki, check out TiddlyWiki Mania.
Originally published June 14, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
The Department of Anatomy at the Univeristy of Toronto has just released Neurons: Animated Cellular and Molecular Concepts, a web-based tutorial which includes some very high-quality Flash animations. Not only have they made the tutorial available to other institutions, but each of the animations used in the tutorial is available for download and use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs license. This means that teachers can use the animations in their lectures and include them when creating thier tutorials, provided of course that they do not alter them in accordance with the no derivatives restriction. Sharing these animations is a step in the right direction towards open knowledge and it would be great to see these animations added to the various repositories such as HealthLibrary.ca and Heal.
Originally published September 23, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
