Insight Mapping: Social bookmarking

Showing posts with label Social bookmarking. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Technology Adoption: The Importance of the Second Trial

I seem to follow a pattern with most web 2.0 tools. There's an initiation phase where I try out the tool and I use it for a short amount of time. In that initiation phase, I figure out how it works, but I'm only scratching the surface of what the tool can do and I'm already noticing some of the drawbacks.

Then my attention span drops off and I barely visit that tool for months at a time. My suspicion is that this is where most people give up on a tool and decide it's not for them. I've done that recently with Quora.

At some point, I come across something on the web that reminds me that I have an account on that tool and I revisit it. Very often, the tool has evolved and added new functionalities between my first and second trials. I'm usually happy with improvements and likely to pick it up again. The second trial tends to be more focused on getting something specific out of it... a more focused project. It doesn't imply that I'm going to use the tool on an ongoing basis, just that I've thought about what the tool can be useful for and when I might need it, not necessarily on a daily basis. This pattern was realized with Pearltrees. I played with it more than a year ago, found it somewhat interesting but limited in the way it structures links between pearls (much less flexible than a mindmap for example, yet much easier to create than a mindmap consisting only of URLs).

One of the drawbacks of Pearltrees is that a Pearl has to be a URL. As far as I can tell, you can't add a "concept" pearl without a link. It's not meant to build concept maps or mind maps. If I'm organizing links, after the first ten links, I'm automatically starting to think about how to group them around key concepts. Pearltrees doesn't allow you to do that easily. To address that challenge, I've used links to Wikipedia as a way of organizing around key concepts in the pearl map below.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Playing with Pearltrees: social bookmarking meets web navigation

Joined a group on Diigo 24 hours ago, opened an email telling me about what other people are tagging in that group, followed a link, discovered Pearltrees. Next step: play for a couple of hours. Let the creative juices flow. How can I use this tool? How does it work?

That's how things happen. Copy some script and voila... click on the pearl below to visit my first Pearltree map.

Try it out for yourself! Discover Pearltrees' website! Watch a YouTube introduction to Pearltrees.

Disclaimer: I have no personal or professional connection to Pearltrees.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Diigo Lists

A while ago, I had to transfer my bookmark collections from FURL to Diigo. While the process was automatic, my tags turned into a mess. I had developed a clever way of organizing my tags in FURL. At the time, I thought it was quite clever. It worked very well for me and I even wrote a little paper about it (Learning from Doing: Social Bookmarking).

I should write a Part II to explain why it turned out to be very dumb. I certainly didn't anticipate having to transfer the bookmarks to another service and what that would mean in terms of "portability." Here's a quick example. I used tags like these:
"ICT -- Access"
"ICT -- Education"
"ICT -- eGov"

In the transfer, these tags ended up split into three parts: "ICT", "--" and "Access". I had 800+ meaningless "--" tags. It will take a while to clean up the mess. There's probably a bigger lesson to be learned here but I haven't figured it out yet.

By the time I'm done with the clean up and I've learned to use all of Diigo's capabilities, it will be time to transfer to the next best thing!

Why bother cleaning up? I would like to be able to link the relevant collections (KM tags in particular), to my Learning Log business novel.

I now have a "didactic fiction" bookmark list on Diigo.