ITO-Announce February / March 2006

The following resources were added to ItrainOnline in February / March 2006

1. Folksonomy and Social Bookmarking Overviews
2. Email Newsletters
3. Content Management and Open Source
4. Tutorials

1. FOLKSONOMY AND SOCIAL BOOKMARKING OVERVIEWS

FOLKSONOMIES - COOPERATIVE CLASSIFICATION AND COMMUNICATION THROUGH SHARED META DATA

This paper by Adam Mathes examines grassroots metadata classification as applied in two web services, Del.icio.us, a tool for organising web pages, and Flikr, a service for organising and sharing photos. Metadata - data about data - facilitates grouping and finding of information. It examines the individual and community aspects of tagging, and focuses on the role of immediate feedback and bridging the gap from the personal to communicative. The article uses illustrative examples from the two web services to help the reader better understand folksonomy and tagging, and offers suggestions for future research.
http://tinyurl.com/4vrc7

THE HIVE MIND: FOLKSONOMIES AND USER-BASED TAGGING

This overview article by Ellyssa Kroski examines characteristics of folksonomies, describes tools for data organisation, and tag clouds.
Folksonomies are inclusive, current, democratic and self-moderating, according to Kroski, but also have plenty of "hitches", which she also details.
http://tinyurl.com/b33fd

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING TOOLS (I)

This article from D-Lib Magazine provides an overview of social bookmarking. It first examines link and bookmark history, tagging, and social issues relevant to social bookmarking. It´s annex offers a review of common social bookmarking tools as of April 2005.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html

FOLKSONOMIES: POWER TO THE PEOPLE

This article helps readers understand different classification processes for web content, when each one is more suitable, and why and how the distributed classification folksonomy model has emerged. With folksonomies, people associate keywords to content (tagging). But tagging alone is not enough, states author Emanuele Quintarelli, it is the possibility of aggregation of that information or "the power of the people".
http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm

7 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

This brief article presents two scenarios of bookmarking use to exemplify the benefits of "social bookmarking", especially in a teaching setting. The concept of social bookmarking is explained, who is doing it, why and how, as well as what the future holds as social bookmarking grows and some of its pros and cons.
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

2. EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOOLS

A FEW GOOD EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOOLS
A brief overview of different tools for distributing and formatting email newsletters. It covers the use of existing email programmes, free online newsletter services, and overviews several paid software options with comments on the specialties of each. It also goes into more technical solutions, as well as offers a taste of strategy beyond newsletters
http://www.idealware.org/articles/fgt_email_newsletter_tools.php

3. CONTENT MANAGEMENT AND OPEN SOURCE

CONTENT MANAGEMENT AND OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS

This white paper explores content management systems (CMS) available from the open source community to fulfill a variety of information scenarios: the online brochure, the news periodical, collaborative spaces, wikis, and online communities. The paper also examines support solutions and why one would want to chose an open source CMS. One big advantage of open source CMS is that the offer the opportunity to deliver tailored content management solutions without the high licensing or management fees associated with commercially-licensed or hosted software. This paper from Optaros White Papers and Reports, available in PDF format, provides an excellent basis for choosing the most appropriate CMS for your needs.
http://www.optaros.com/pdf/optaros_cmsReport_012206_sgg.pdf

4. TUTORIALS

FREE ACCESS TUTORIAL

This series of nine web-based tutorials covers the basics of using Microsoft Access, including understanding what a database is, developing queries, working with forms and formulating reports and macros. Each tutorial covers a series of specific topics and ends with a review of content and a quiz to test your knowledge. Though there is no download option or printer-friendly version, the tutorial´s clear writing makes the clicking worthwhile.
http://www.brainbell.com/tutorials/ms-office/Access_2003/

HTML AND CSS TUTORIAL

Fifteen tutorials take you through understanding html and cascading style sheets to improve web design capabilities. The tutorials provide theory, practical images and code, as well as a bit of history of each of the different features to facilitate web developer decision-making. Each tutorial covers a series of specific topics and ends with a review of content and a quiz to test your knowledge. Comparisons of results in different browsers, especially when using CSS, are useful.
http://www.brainbell.com/tutorials/HTML_and_CSS/