Sharing the Addiction

I have to admit that recently I have not been ‘playing’ with as many new tools as I have done previously. I think that this is partially because the tools I do use on a regular basis meet most of my online needs.  I don’t often see things that either surpass what I am using already or excite me from an eduational standpoint. There is also the fact that I have been having a bit of a break from my online life of late. Still, every now and then, I have a spate of looking around to see what I’ve been missing and today has been one of those days. Here are some of the things I’ve been trying out.

ShareTabs

This is a service where you can enter the URL addresses of a number of websites and it will turn them into a set of tabs (these will apear as sub-tabs within one of your tabs/windows) which can be accessed from a single hyperlink. There is a visual preview of these sites on the landing page when people follow the link. I tried it out by making all of my website links into a single ShareTab link. I think this will certainly reduce the cluster in my email signatures!!

Postrank

This is an RSS tool that prioritises the top posts in any feed based on the number of comments, saves to Delicious and links to the post among other measures. This means that you can identify the most popular posts on the site very quickly and can get a widget that shows this. When I put in my blog feed, this is what it came up with:

I’m not sure if I would have called these my favourite posts but I found this a very interesting exercise.

Thanks to the guys at the Tek blog for the following:

Shape Collage

A simple application that will turn photos that you drag into the interface into a collage – you can choose from a variety of shapes. It is a simple programme that does exactly what it is supposed to. I did wonder if the excellent Google’s Picasa software (now available for Mac and PC) might be better to use to do this on many occassions as you can do things like reposition images within the collage and resize individual photos. Still, it won’t do some of the shapes easily that Shape Collage does so I guess it is just personal choice. Picasa also does a lot more than just collages and maybe it is useful to have a dedicated piece of software for this purpose. You let me know your thoughts.

Enough for this evening. I will keep playing and see if I can find anything else of interest!

Tags: web 2.0

I seem to be having a bit of a run on interesting behaviour on my wikis. I was on my educational software wiki today and discovered a YouTube video had been added to the front page with the title ‘Latest resource’. Not wanting to be too territorial, I checked out what it was about. It was a short promo video for a new book on Web 2.0 that is available for purchase.  I don’t appreciate people using the front page of my wiki as an advertisement space so I have deleted the video. I guess what is really rude is the way it was posted in a way to look as if it was me adding a new resource to page and no message to me first to check it was OK. At least whoever posted it (the history showed that the person wasn’t logged in when they edited so I can’t trace it back) thinks that my wiki is popular enough to warrant the effort!