The ITS Coffee Break podcast shares two tools that I wanted to pass along. The tools Libworm and Del.icio.us are mentioned in the December 18, 2006 episode, that also commented on iTunes U and Moodle pilots Lafayette is conducting so you will need to wade through that to get to the good stuff.
I have not use libworm as of yet but it sounds like the Librarians and Instructional Technologists at Lafayette are intrigued by the potential. According to the about libworm page, "LibWorm is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries." It works by collecting updates from RSS feeds allowing one to search for content within RSS feeds and also generate a feed that delivers new results for your search as they are posted. It sounds like it is the search that keeps on giving. At this point, the service is still in beta so who knows will it stay, go, be bought up by google or yahoo, or start to charge. For now it is interesting to consider but how is it really that different from the search alerts from google blog search or technorati?
The other tool, del.icio.us, is a great tool for collecting, organizing and sharing web resources. It is one of the more popular social bookmarking tools, if not the most popular. I have been using it over a year now to keep track of different sites and resources. I really like it for a few simple reasons. First it is easy. I signed up for an account and was tagging resources in minutes. I can also share my bookmarks with others in a variety of ways including rss, widgets on webpages, and using a for:
But that is a different post and enough of me pushing this social software stuff. I often feel like I am floating alone, or nearly alone, with all of this new Web 2.0 stuff. I wonder if there are ways we in computing can help our users accomplish their work more efficiently by taking advantage of the social creation model characterized by Web 2.0?