Seward Incorporated

The First 4,000 Words is a program that Seward Incorporated has developed for first- through fourth-grade students to help build vocabulary for struggling readers and English Language Learners. The web-based lessons use interactive reading activities and games to teach the 4,000 most frequently used English words. The site can be licensed to individual teachers, or to an entire school, for classroom use.

Minnewashta Elementary School, a Minnetonka Public School in Minnesota, has recently adopted The First 4,000 Words for their 370 students in 1st-4th grade. Principal Cindy Andress says, “We have the technology at our fingertips to use an online tool. The First 4,000 Words program will be engaging for students and easy for the staff to set up and use in a way that will make a difference in the life of our students.” Teachers participating in field tests have also reported that the program was engaging, easy to use, and appealing and fun for students.

To introduce The First 4,000 Words to more schools, teachers, and students, Seward Incorporated is now giving away 100 free teacher licenses and 10 free school licenses. Teachers can learn more about the program and enter to win at www.thefirst4000words.com/contest .

I’d like to think we have a little bit of summer left here in Minnesota before we make our grim descent into winter, but already someone is wrapping up the year.  ReadWriteWeb is one of my favorite blogs and recently posted a series of articles under the title “Top 5 Web Trends of 2009.” The trends they identify are Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, and Internet of Things. It’s an interesting read with links to great examples. Originally presented as a series of articles, it now is compiled into one article and a SlideShare presentation on the topic.

That article sets the stage for this blog post. I wanted to share some innovative tools I’ve been using lately. The good news is they are all free (so no commission for moi!) They’re good examples of the ReadWriteWeb trends article, and each of these tools are unique and useful.

In no particular order, they are:

Sharein
This is a bookmarking/sharing tool with user stats. I really like this tool. You can share links via email, Twitter, and Facebook. Then you can see what happened! It collects comments people make and shows whether they shared the link you sent them. This article on ReadWriteWeb provides a good overview:  Sharein Launches New Features, Becomes Must-Have for Social Media. Sharein also offers a great explanatory video on their web site.

Google Fast Flip
Newly announced from Google, Google Fast Flip is a way to quickly scan and read news from a variety of sources on a variety of topics. Keyword searching tunes the news items to specifically what you are interested in. Nice visual presentation of the various media properties’ pages, but without the agonizing load time. Also works on Android and iPhone.

Google - Internet Stats
Newly announced from Google, Google Internet Stats provides one place to find trends in technology, econ, media, and consumer behavior. I love that they have pulled this together in one place. It replaces about 20 old bookmarked sites for me.

Threadsy
This is a TechCrunch overview and video of Threadsy, a communications integration client for email, IM, Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, and more (40 in all). The overview is very helpful in understanding Threadsy as not just another lame aggregator. It seems more akin to Google Wave, but it’s free. Threadsy is a web-based client, not a download. You can filter results and delve into users’ profiles/use habits. Actually looks promising as aggregators go. Sign up for a beta account – limited time to get one.

TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a free Adobe Air application, so you need to download it. Although it’s still in beta, I’ve been using it successfully for a long time. TweetDeck is a great example of structured data - you can organize tweets by topic, person, group, or keyword; filter them; see trends; manage multiple accounts; post to Facebook; shorten URLs; and, of course, communicate with one or many people in your Tweetdom. TweetDeck will open up a whole new world of using Twitter data for business, marketing, communication, and research purposes.

Please tell us about your experience with these tools and any others you are using successfully.

In my last post, I wrote about the necessity of a detail design document that captures the smallest details of the project and how they interrelate. The creation phase concludes with the eLearning product development.

The work you do during analysis and design takes shape during the development stage. This is when your team actually creates the eLearning product. The Development Stage is extremely intense and demanding for team members on both the development and client side.

Using the detail design document as a guide, your development team produces or secures all of the media assets (such as graphics, photographs, animations, narrations, sound effects, and video). Then, the developer uses the authoring tool to assemble and present the assets. Of course, the authoring must also incorporate all the required navigation, orientation, interaction, management, record keeping, and administrative features. In some cases, some of these feature may also be part of the learning management system (LMS) used to launch and document the outcomes of training. All this is thoroughly specified in the detail design document.

Prior to development, people new to eLearning seldom value the amount of analysis and design work that is undertaken during a project. However, once development begins, it is all justified and appreciated. The effort put forth in determining learner motivation, preferences for graphic styles, prior experience with eLearning, and countless other details, begins to pay off. Why? Because the development team has the information they need to create an eLearning product they know will be effective.

All of the tough decisions are made during the analysis and design stages. Once it has been reviewed and approved by the subject matter experts (SMEs), the detail design document becomes a “recipe book” that the production team will follow. For example, using the specified naming convention provided in the documentation by the instructional designer, the graphic artist labels and stores newly created images. In turn, the developer referring to the documentation quickly identifies the correct graphic file he or she needs for a particular module. Then, following the documentation, he or she can integrate the asset at the correct location in the program begin authored.

Because everyone is following the same directions (the detail design document) this work is accomplished with a minimum effort and a high degree of confidence. The detail design document expedites production by being a common source with all the details needed by the production team. These details range from the sequencing of presentation elements to performance tracking requirements, audio scripts, and the file formats needed to export data.

Authoring is the use of development tools to create eLearning products. There are many different tools on the market. Selection of specific development tools should be guided by a few basic questions:

• How will your instruction be delivered?
• What are the dominant characteristics of your lesson design? Does it require lots of animation, video, and audio?
• Does it contain high levels of interactivity and require tracking larger volumes of learner statistics?
• Who will be responsible for authoring and maintaining the eLearning and what programs have they worked with? What is their skill level?
• What other systems must the eLearning “communicate” with inside your organization?

Both development tools and developers have their limitations. When your team is designing a lesson, you need to keep these limitations in mind. Otherwise, your vision may exceed your reach.

>View samples of projects developed by Seward Inc.

We love when there’s content on the internet that we can actually use in our work! Here are some blogs and sites that have captured our attention in the last week or so:

Great Websites are Boring to Manage

In this blog post, Gerry McGovern helps you analyze, “Who is your website for?”.

Rediscovering Communication

This post on Colleen Jones’ More Than Words blog offers guidance for user experience professionals to rediscover real communication.

The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines

This Copyblogger post by Brian Clark offers tips for writing attention-getting Twitter headlines. Find out about his 4-U approach.

Results for Internet’s “Next Big Thing” Survey

Survey answers from asking what was the “Next Big Thing” on the internet that would change our lives. About 100 digital visionaries from different online groups and platforms answered.

Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data — rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer, as a search engine might. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and released to the public on May 15, 2009.

Online PR: Top 40 Ways to Get Noticed Online (Apart from Twitter)

Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Ning, Squidoo, Furl, Tubearoo, Wikihow, YouTube, Magnolia, LinkedIn, eCademy, Ryze, Y or Z, Xing, Facebook, Care2, Gather, Meetin.org, Tribe, Ziggs, Plaxo, NetParty, Networking_for_Professionals, Groovy, Mixx, Teako, Small Business Brief, Sphinn, BuzzFlash.net, Hubspot, SEO Tagg, Wikipedia, Newsvine, 43 Things, Wetpaint, Frappr, Yahoo Answers.

How MySpace Fell Off the Pace (Los Angeles Times)

A great analysis of how MySpace lost its edge to Facebook.

MarketingCharts: Charts and Data for Marketers in Web and Excel Format

Found via Hubspot blog article. MarketingCharts is published daily; examples include Top Google Advertisers, Top 10 Online Retailers, and Top 10 Social Networks.

How Do You Convince Executives that Social Media Marketing, Blogging, and SEO Are Important?

Hubspot blog article with great data on time commitment, usage, and benefits of social media.

One of the biggest challenges for a web development company is developing its own web site. First, there’s the “shoemaker’s kids” excuse – never time to work on our own site because we’re busy developing sites for clients. Then there’s the list of cool programming, design, and content things we’d like to try – problematic since the list is constantly changing. And last, there’s the daunting fact that the site is a representation of our staff’s professional skill, creativity, and experience, all rolled up into a representation of our company’s brand. In this respect, developing a new web site is, for a web development company, not unlike bringing a child into the world.

But since our “oldest child” (previous web site) was going on six (a senior citizen in internet years), we committed ourselves to developing a new Seward web site.  We knew the site had to embody web 2.0 principles (Wikipedia defines these as “facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web”.) We grounded our plans in the idea of implementing the features most often requested by clients or prospective clients:

• Easy-to-use content management system (free, open source)
• Integration with social marketing tools, including a blog (free widgets and blog application)
• Web analytics (Google Analytics)
• Search engine optimization (based on our expertise)
• eCommerce capability (free, open source)
• Strong branding influence (based on our expertise)

We sat down as a team to begin planning on March 30, 2009. On June 23, 2009, we flipped the switch, and the new SewardInc.com went live. The site was conceived, mapped, designed, constructed, written, coded, and integrated with social media and store and blog functionality in 61 days.

Of course web sites are never done, and part of our planning involved designing a site whose content could remain as fresh as possible. Having a content management system helps. Joomla (the open source content management system we employed) is rich with features that allow anyone – not just technical staff – to have control over the content. Setting up the structure requires some healthy forethought, but after that, it’s quite easy to add and update text, images, and links. Behind the scenes, you also can add meta information (titles, descriptions, and keywords) and alternative text, supporting search engine optimization and accessible devices.

Our blog (a great way to keep you on your toes about keeping your content fresh!) is built from the Wordpress server version. Wordpress, like Joomla, is a content management system, but it is much better suited for blog creation and management. Joomla is better suited (for our purposes) for web page management. The server version of Wordpress offers a great advantage over the hosted version in that you can integrate the blog into your site’s interface and choose from and easily install many useful widgets. The cool tag cloud seen at the top of the blog page is a widget that took all of five minutes to add to our blog. We’ve also used widgets to connect to Seward’s accounts on Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slideshare, and Flickr.

Site content is further freshened by integration of our Twitter feeds and a nice tool for bookmarking and sharing press releases and blog articles called Add This. We walk the talk of social marketing by encouraging our staff to promote our blog articles and press releases using AddThis, providing them a title, URL, and short description with which to do this.

Three departures from our old site bear explaining:

Our Staff: Staff photos and bios now included

Having staff photos and bios is not feasible for every organization. But in ours, who we are, what people say about us, and the client relationships each of our staff has the opportunity to develop are strong promotional forces for us – much more so than the Super Bowl ads we will never run.  So the power behind our success is derived from “social” action vs. “commercial” action. And now an added boost comes from social media tools our staff uses for their own professional development. LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups, Delicious, Twitter, SlideShare, and other social bookmarking and networking sites are producing increased referrals to the Seward web site.

Our Services:  A slimmed down case study section

Companies like ours frequently have large case study sections. We’re taking this opportunity to provide visitors with bite-sized pieces of what we do each time they visit the site. Offerings are clearly listed, but we’ll frequently rotate in new details of each of our service offerings – another way to keep site content fresh. To inject a little “wow” factor, we’ve used another free mini-app called Visual Lightbox that allows us to display visual pieces in a way that is both interesting and easy to update.

Our Products: The introduction of our new store

We’ve given this online store application quite a workout, completely integrating it into the web site interface and offering six products with quite different unit sales formats. Transactions are handled through PayPal, with payment options via PayPal account or major credit card.

Assessor is our online exam building tool and Public Jobs : Private Data is online data security training. Both are sold via licenses that can be immediately purchased from the online store.

Digging Reading and OnLine Reading Resources are resources for teachers and schools, promoting improvement in reading comprehension. These products are offered as downloadable resources purchased through the online store.

CENTSS (The Center for Transforming Student Services) provides services to colleges and universities to assess the quality of their online student services. A licensable component is the online student services audit that is available by contacting Seward. Payment can be made by invoice, PayPal account, or credit card.

The First 4,000 Words is an interactive web-based system that incorporates the 4,000 most frequently used words in the English language into student vocabularies using stories, pictures, voice-recognition, and games. System licenses are available by contacting Seward; story bundles will be offered as downloadable resources purchased from the online store.

All of these elements roll up into our brand, which you’ll hear in the plain-spoken writing, see in the whimsical icons and photo treatments, and experience as you interact with the site. And so, without further ado, we’re pleased to introduce the new SewardInc.com.

Flickr: jimforsberg

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of conducting a front-end analysis for eLearning products. So, what is next in the eLearning creation phase? Design—most importantly the writing of the detail design document.

A detail design document is necessary before eLearning development can begin. This document must capture the smallest details of the project and communicate how they interrelate with the specificity required to guide production of the eLearning software.

The detail design document must communicate the following:

• Information Treatments: Presenting content and directions, including sequencing the presentation of instructional text, graphics, narration, informational audio, and video.
• Orientation Strategies: Communicating to learners their location within the software. Strategies include the use of headers, subheaders, icons, colors, and page numbers.
• Navigation Techniques: Establishing functions that allow learners to move from place to place in the software, including menus, buttons, and links.
• Aesthetics Elements: Representing appropriate culture, mood, status, and attitude, through the use of colors, images, sounds, and font styles.
• Featured Tools: Providing support devices, including such things as bookmarks, notepads, and calculators.

Of course, there are many aspects of an eLearning application that are not as obvious to learners as the instructional presentation. These must also be clearly documented in the detail design document. They include the following:

• Adaptive Designs: Strategies to modify the presentation of the instruction to better accommodate the unique characteristics of a learner of category of learners.
• Learner Management: Strategies for directing learners to the appropriate areas of study based on job requirements or patterns of performance.
• Record Keeping/Security: Techniques for tracking time on tasks, items presented, responses, scores, options selected, progress, and limiting access to this information based on established criteria.
• Reporting: Methods for customizing and filing individual and/or group reports (electronically or in print) to the learner, as well as the organization.
• Administration: Features for adding or deleting students and for modifying instructional requirements, such as mastery criteria.

The detail design document serves several other purposes in addition to its primary role of guiding development. These include the following:

• It allows the eLearning developers and clients to verify the logic and flow of the design before production begins.
• It provides an easy means for the subject matter expert to review the content and make edits prior to production, thereby controlling cost.
• It serves as a “blueprint,” which can be archived for reference if modification becomes necessary in the future.

Creation of a sound detail design document is an essential component of an eLearning product’s lifecycle. Failure to do an adequate job at this point in the process will almost certainly result in cost overruns, missed or inappropriately covered content, and ineffective training.

At Seward Inc., we created the e-Prep tool to help our clients start the eLearning design process and define their e-learning needs. You can also use it to explore your needs.

This week, I’d like to share some informative articles, resources, and opinions about measuring the value of social media. Besides death and taxes, I think the only other sure thing in life is your own opinion, so I’m going to exercise the blogger’s prerogative and start by sharing my own opinion about measuring social media.

Some of the articles noted below bear the term “ROI” in their titles. ROI, or return on investment, in terms of advertising, is the sum of all of the campaign costs divided by the revenues derived from sales made as a result of the campaign. ROI of campaigns usually includes a timeframe over which these sales occur. Viewed this way, different campaigns can be compared and the most effective/economical one chosen.

Campaign ROI is a great and wonderful calculation to achieve. However, as you can imagine, it’s a difficult calculation to make, even with the most calculable of business models. And because everyone’s cost structure is different, ROI is not transferable from one industry to another. It’s probably not transferable from one organization to another either. That said, responsible marketers still strive to measure campaign ROI, and in some ways, web analytics has made this easier for the digital marketer. 

Enter social media. 

Social media is an example of “inbound marketing,” where the focus is on getting found by customers rather than finding them. This concept, put forward by Hubspot, differs from traditional “outbound” marketing in that

“Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.”

For example:  

“Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information.”

So by putting more power into the hands of the customer, social media contains aspects of both permission-based advertising and viral advertising. While permission-based advertising can be quantified in terms of impressions, clicks, prospects acquired, and even sales made, the effect of viral advertising is more difficult to measure. 

For example, potential customers may subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed to hear about new products. As a result, they may eventually become a customer. They’ve given you permission to distribute your sales pitch to them and they may reward you with a sale. This is permission-based advertising. You can calculate the cost of promoting your product through channels that include the blog and divide that by the revenues received. 

These same individuals also may email a link to the video in your blog to their colleagues. And those people may send the link on to others, some of whom may reward you by becoming a customer sometime in the future. This is viral advertising*, and it is much more difficult to measure because some of the work is being done by people who don’t work for you over an extended period of time. How do you measure word-of-mouth? How do you measure increased exposure? How do you measure influence? How do you measure the “long tail*” effect? In this regard, social media is very similar to public relations. 

*For more information on these concepts, see Wikipedia:

Viral Marketing

The Long Tail

The following articles take a stab at helping us solve the thorny problem of measuring the value of social media. I hope these are useful to you.

Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions from the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. They are probably best known for defining standard sizes for online display ads. This downloadable PDF specifies standard definitions and metrics for social media sites, blogs, and widgets and social media applications. Whether you use their definitions or your own, defining the characteristics of your social media tool is an essential first step in calculating its ROI.

Social media ROI: Measuring the Unmeasurable?

A great presentation with use cases. Topics include:

Social Media Measurement « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing

Jeremiah Owyang’s blog archive of articles about Social Media Measurement. Jeremiah is a thought leader in social media.

Sampling of blog topics:

• Measurement, A Priority for Online Communities
• Community Managers Must Deliver ROI:  Commandments for Surviving a Recession
• Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter
• Understanding HP Lab’s Twitter Research
• Retweet: The Infectious Power of Word of Mouth

More on the ROI of Social Media: Return on Influence | Debbie Weil on Corporate Blogging and Social Media

Debbie Weil’s blog post, “More on the ROI of Social Media: Return on Influence” makes the point that social media is both a response medium and an influence medium. Both need to be taken into account during measurement.

Proving PR success in digital media

This article is featured in the May/June 2009 edition of Communications World, the magazine of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). IABC requires you to subscribe and login at their web site to read these articles, but it is available as a downloadable PDF here. The author, Lawrence Ampofo, argues that no standard set of metrics can be applicable to PR measurement in the era of online and digital media. Lawrence provides some fascinating insights on relevant metrics for social media and networks in general and Twitter in particular.

Flickr: phatfreemiquel

In my last post, Hidden Treasure: How Faculty Can Be Your Source for Fresh Web Content, I told you how to use your faculty’s knowledge and research to create fresh web content, which increases traffic to your site. So, you’ve started the conversation with faculty, and you’ve gotten some great content. Now what? Use this list of my favorite web writing best practices to make your content useful to your readers.

• Remember, your institution is not the center of the universe. Gerry McGovern advises, “It can be a fatal mistake to think that what you care about most is what your reader cares about most. You sell yourself, your product, your service, your idea, or your beliefs by first and foremost connecting with what your audience really cares about.” (Killer Web Content, 2006) Enough said.
• Use second person voice (you) in your headings and throughout your web site. This choice allows you to adopt a conversational tone with your readers. Remember! Your web site is your side of a helpful, action-oriented conversation with prospective students and the general public.
• Keep your headings to eight words or fewer. Headings should not read like a sentence, so edit out redundant words and phrases. It should also make sense on its own, because it will often be on its own in search results or on a menu page.
• Use words in your headings that your readers care about. Your heading is the hook for readers who are scanning for the information they need. Answer: “What about this faculty research will my visitors find most interesting and useful? What words can I use to compel them to click on links and explore the site?”
• Never start a link, heading, or sentence with your college or university’s name. Your readers are already on your web site. So, they have the context for the content presented.
• Keep your sentences and paragraphs short and sweet. Keep sentences to 20 words or fewer and paragraphs to 70 words or fewer (about four sentences).
• Never have a dead-end in your web content. Always put a call to action link at the end of your profiles and stories. These links allow you to guide readers to content that will be useful and informative. Answer: “What do I want my readers to do after they have read this faculty research profile? Navigate to programs? Learn more about the university?”
• Use active voice in your call to action links. Remember your readers are on your site to find useful information and complete tasks. Don’t make them guess about what they can accomplish when they follow a link.
• Keep links short. Links should be short, specific, action-oriented phrases with eight words or fewer. Say, “Apply this research to your work.” Not, “Click here for more.” Tell the reader what task they can complete by following the link.
• Put links on separate lines, below the main content. Links embedded in paragraphs and sentences can get lost in the shuffle. Put a link on its own line to focus your reader’s attention.

Want more information? Read Gerry McGovern’s blog for more ways to create killer content. The source for many of these tips is Gerry McGovern’s Killer Web Content—a great read.

In today’s blog post, I’d like to tell you about two great tools for capturing, organizing, and sharing content on the web.  These social bookmarking sites allow you to save content without being shackled to your computer’s browser.

First, a couple of definitions:

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. (Wikipedia)

Folksonomy is a feature of Web 2.0 whereby non-experts create and manage keywords or terms to annotate and categorize content. 

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us and renamed Delicious.com in 2008) is one of the original social bookmarking websites, launched in 2003. 

Like all of these tools, an account on Delicious is free. If you come across a webpage you’d like to save (blog article, website, report PDF, whatever), you can go to your Delicious page, click on “Save a new bookmark,” and it will take you through the steps of adding it to your page. First you enter the URL, and then it takes you to a form to add page title, notes, and tags. 

Productivity alert:  Notes are a little more work, but they are very helpful when you want to find a specific article you remember bookmarking. They also are helpful to people with whom you share your bookmarks. Tags are keywords or terms  you append to the bookmarked page that allow you to organize and categorize your set of links. Tags can get out of control fast if you don’t have an organization strategy. However, it’s probably best to just dive in and start tagging. You will soon develop a strategy for tagging, and you can easily go back in and retag some of your initial bookmarks.

Delicious allows you to share your bookmarks with others in two ways:

1. You can add people to your network and they can add you to theirs. In this way, they can see your bookmarks and you can see theirs.  Go to “Settings,” click on “Edit Network” under “People,” and add people to your network by entering their username. You also can remove them from your network here.
2. You can share a specific bookmark with others. When you save a bookmark, type “for:USERNAME” in the “Tags” field and they will receive this bookmark in their Delicious inbox. If they are part of your network, just click on the “People” tab below the form and click on their username.

Delicious has nice tools for importing your browser’s bookmarks, integrating with your blog, creating RSS feeds, and more.  Like all social sites, there is a spot to create a personal profile. The Delicious profile is limited to display name, email address, and one website URL. You control whether these are displayed or not. Since I use Delicious for professional networking, I make these public.

One of the tools I use most is the Delicious toolbar. 

The advantage of this toolbar is being able to save a bookmark while I’m on a page without navigating away from it to go to Delicious.com. This saves me a lot of time. Two downsides of this toolbar are that it requires browser dependency and toolbars add to processing overhead, which can adversely affect your computer’s performance. The toolbar is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. 

I like Delicious for its browser/computer-independent quality, support for organizing my web resources, and large network of users with whom I can share information easily.

Feel free to view my Delicious bookmarks and add me to your network if you like:  http://delicious.com/vfrank

Diigo is a social bookmarking site that launched in 2006. Diigo stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” 

Diigo works like Delicious (saving, tagging, sharing) with some powerful additional features:

• Ability to highlight parts of a webpage and write and attach “sticky notes” to pages. The bookmarked pages retain these highlights and notes and these can be shared within Diigo or forwarded to someone outside of Diigo. 
• Visual representations of the bookmarked pages as well as descriptions and tags.
• Ability to see who else has bookmarked the same URL and what, if any, comments they’ve made about it (great for monitoring your own website or blog.)
• An “About” link associated with each bookmarked page that provides a Popularity Report (based on how the URL fares with social bookmarking sites), Google Rank, URL tag cloud for the page, bookmark history, and sticky notes about the page marked public and the people who created them.
• A “Comment” link allows you to add a comment about the bookmarked page.
• Ability to find “friends and contacts” on Diigo. You can provide your email and password for many of the free email services (e.g., gmail, hotmail, msn) or you can search for friends and contacts by their email address. 
• A more extensive profile section than Delicious. You can upload a photo; add a statement about yourself/your work; add your location, language, and industry; enter two personal URLs; and add profiles elsewhere (i.e., LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Delicious.)  

Diigo offers a downloadable “Diigolet” for your toolbar (browser-dependency and overhead again!) that releases you from going to the site for bookmarking. 

Feel free to view my Diigo bookmarks and add me to your network: http://www.diigo.com/user/vickyfrank

Diigo is at a disadvantage because Delicious has such a large, established base of users. I currently prefer Delicious because the user network is so large. However, Diigo is trying hard to acquire users with a substantial number of features not found on Delicious. For me, this is both intriguing and off-putting. I like the idea of the extras you get with Diigo, but I find all the bells and whistles somewhat distracting. That said, I also think Delicious is due an interface redesign because their navigation has grown to be somewhat clunky.

With the advent of Twitter, blogposts, and tools that make bookmarking easy, more people are hearing about social bookmarking. For research, networking, and managing the vast amounts of information that fly by you on the Internet, I highly recommend you try Delicious and Diigo.

I recently returned from a trip to the Sultanate of Oman where I led a seminar on using social media tools in teaching. The questions I received prompted today’s blog article, which I hope will be of interest to educators and others interested in social tools.

Sources of Information about Social Learning and Social Tools
Social Learning is a new term being used to describe Web2.0 learning environments and tools.  I’ve assembled and annotated 21 web resources educators will find of interest at my Delicious link here: http://delicious.com/vfrank/education.

Here is a sample of what you’ll find there:

A Guide to Social Learning
A Guide to Social Learning provides a practical guide to getting engaged with social media and understanding their use for formal and informal learning as well as for collaborative working. Contents includes:

• What is Social Learning?
• Using Social Media in Formal and Informal Learning
• Using Social Media to improve Productivity and Performance
• From Systems that Manage Learning to Networks that Enable Learning
• Building a formal learning environment - using Moodle
• Engaging with Social Media

Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter
This Directory lists (in alphabetical order by Twitter username) “894 education professionals and counting” on Twitter. You may contact them to get yourself listed.

Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies
This site is a source of many good websites and blogs related to “social learning,” including A Guide to Social Learning mentioned above. They offer a Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter, comprised of 800 learning professionals who use Twitter.

Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education
This is a blog article from February 2009 that has been quoted quite broadly – recently in The Chronicle. It lists 18 educators you may want to investigate for information about using social tools in teaching.

Twitter for Professional Development
I have collected many resources about using Twitter for professional development. An emerging trend related to Twitter is the ability to form groups devoted to specific topics. One of the sites that supports groups is Twibes.com. There currently are 38 Education “twibes”  including EdTech, HigherEd, Teachers on Twitter, englishteachers, and eLearning. EdTech and HigherEd are listed among the most popular twibes. If you want to join these groups, you’ll find them here:  http://www.twibes.com/category/education. Joining is free. There is no requirement for participation, but you may find this a useful place to find other educators. There also is a Moodle twibe that just started.

Social Media Aggregators
When you start using social media tools, it hits you how many there are and how nice it would be if there was a simple way to manage them all in one place. Commonly called “aggregators,” these tools would provide a single dashboard to manage one’s social tools like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, etc.

It seems a given that there would be one tool out there that everyone uses, but, as yet, no leading tools have emerged. There are, however, a lot of emerging tools, and I’ve assembled some articles and tool sites in my Delicious links.  Here’s a summary of the tools I’ve set up. Links to more information about these are found at my Delicious link here:  http://delicious.com/vfrank/aggregators.

Noovo
Aggregates:  Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Blogspot, and Wordpress
Positive:  You can start or join a group specific to a topic of interest.
Negative:  Includes a friend-based tool so you’ll get friend requests (may be a positive to some.) Limited tool choices to aggregate.

OnePoke
Aggregates:  Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, hi5, Frype, MyLifeList, PlentyOfFish, LavaLife, Okcupud, eHarmony, CasualKiss, PerfectMatch, YouTube
Positive:  It’s the only one that aggregates LinkedIn.
Negative:  It aggregates a bunch of dating sites (may be a positive for some.)

Pixelpipe
Aggregates:  Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress, YouTube, Box.net, and 69 other social sites.
Positive:  By far, the most social tool choices I’ve come across. Very easy to post to many sites in one click.
Negative:  Although there are 76 tools to choose from, most are ones I don’t use.

Skimmer
Aggregates:  Twitter, Facebook, Flicker, YouTube, Blogs
Positive:  Skimmer is an Adobe Air application, which means you download it (free). It provides an elegant user experience.
Negative:  Currently in beta, there are limited tool choices to aggregate.

For a review of other social media tool aggregators, see Jolie O’Dell’s critique:  The Aggregators/Status Pushers: A Blogroast  http://jolieodell.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/social-aggregators-status-pushers/.

Educators who are beginning to use Moodle may be seeing more integrated social tools there.  As these tools emerge, we will keep our blog readers apprised.

Social Media Growth
Social media tools are growing fast, and I’ve assembled some of the latest reports of usage of these tools at my Delicious link here:  http://delicious.com/vfrank/socialmediastats. Some recent stats:

• Facebook:  April 17, 2009:  Facebook has grown from 100 million to 200 million users in less than 8 months. If it were a country, it would be bigger than Brazil.
• LinkedIn:  March 2, 2009, Adage:  It hit 36 million members and is adding them at a rate of about one member per second. According to ComScore, it’s gone from about 3.6 million unique monthly visitors a year ago to 7.7 million today.
• Twitter:  April 17, 2009:  According to Nielsen, Twitter currently has 7 million unique monthly visitors. If it keeps growing at this rate, it’ll have nearly 100 million visitors same time next year. Twitter membership has grown an astonishing 1,382 percent from February 2008 to February 2009. It is a growing force with people of all ages. Watch for a future article about two high-powered programs for managing your Twitter accounts, TweetDeck and Seesmic.

We will be reporting on developments in social learning, social media tools, professional development opportunities, and growth trends in coming blog posts.