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Quote of the week: 2010 Horizon Report

The Horizon Report 2010 edition describes emerging technologies. Included in this year’s list is mobile computing, open content, electronic books, visual data analysis, simple augmented reality, and gesture-based computing. The following quote comes from the introductory remarks to the section on Open Content:

“The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it”.

The report is available at net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5810.pdf (PDF).

Social bookmarking with Diigo

tagcloudSocial bookmarking is the process of users storing and organizing webpages and web content in an open and public fashion. The end result of this is something called a folksonomy. Where a taxonomy is a strict categorization of the formal structure of a given thing, a folksonomy is a categorization and organization of the structure of a given entity by the common people (“folks”) who choose to help organize the information.

This organizational schema is created by individual users “tagging” bookmarks with keywords that the user think can be attributed to the content (and is usually expressed using a “tag cloud” — see image above). Different from the concepts of folders, tagging allows any individual piece of information to be attributed with a countless number of keywords or “tags”.

More than a subtle shift, the development of social bookmarking — which helped reconceptualize organizing information through the use of tags instead of folders and resulted in the creation of a human-powered folksonomy — is one of the foundational elements to the current dynamic and ultra-networked Web (2.0).

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Twitter not just a “what am I doing now” service

Twitter started out as a micro-blogging system that served the basic function of answering the question, “What am I doing now?” Over the last few years, this status-update service has grown in different directions, all of which have been user-driven. Although there are plenty of “I’m at work” updates floating around Twitter, users are expanding the horizons of Twitter into an emergency-update service, information exchange, marketing system, and a more robust status-update system.

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