Del.icio.us offers at least three ways to display your tags. The first two involve a simple toggle-between with one click, but the bundled tag cloud could suck hours of life force depending on how ADD you are and how random chaotic your tagging style has been. If you already have a del.icio.us account, go ahead and explore the possibilities now. You can always toggle back and return after a B12.
Bundling your tags will help you stay organized and help others find your stuff.
- If you have a lot of tags already, it helps to copy a list of them, print them out and decide which big folder categories you want.
- Use highlighters to color code all tags you want to go into a particular category. Some will want to belong to more than one, and that’s ok too. It does not matter whether a bundle name is an existing tag or a made up word. And don’t obsess; you can return and change things or leave some tags unbundled.
- Scroll down to the bottom of your tag list and select tag options, bundle tags. If you don’t see this, you are not logged in.
- Follow the directions on that page. It’s helpful to work with only one bundle at a time because the tags you select to go into a category get highlighted as you use them. Also, if you were to type a bunch of bundle names first without putting tags into them, they disappear because, as noted near the bottom, “Empty bundles are automatically deleted.”
Some Web 2.0 tools are so familiar that I forget most people do not already know about them. I’ve decided that from now on, anything I end up explaining more than once might as well be explained here. Del.icio.us is one of those Web 2.0 tools that elicited a “Where has this been all my life?” reaction when I first discovered it seven months and 425 saved links ago. Now I am an evangelist.
Del.icio.us lets you save favorite web links to their server instead of your own computer and even provides a bookmarking icon for your toolbar. If you move between computers, your favorites are always accessible on the web. Friends and colleagues can subscribe to each other’s favorites in case they share common interests.
As you save a link, you have the option of making a note about the link. Another field lets you type in a word or two, or as many as you want, to describe it -and this is called tagging. These tags are then hyperlinked for you in a sidebar list to the right. Anyone visiting your Del.icio.us page can quickly see what you have been valuing on the Net. We are what we eat in some respects. (I tag, therefore I am?)
It’s been one of those weeks full of sparkler conversations played out during catch up with long neglected others. As I sat down to fish out the followup links I promised people, it occurs to me that blogging about the sparks and saving the links here might bring small relivable joys. Before I light the match, I need to paint a backdrop that will hang against other things I have in mind to illuminate soon.
The color of my restless clouded mind settled into dark sky at the Northern Voice bloggers conference in B.C. last month. Brilliant stars filled my gaze for three days, and I felt small and quiet in their presence. All the topics I think about, like community, social media, instructional technology, reflective practice, the emerging self, freeing and being visual, these bloggers live, breathe, and write about. Technologies I have wanted to play with like liveblogging, videopodcasting, and light painting were in use while they spoke. Packed rooms and lecture theaters glowed with laptop screens as everything that occurred was tapnoted tagged and transcribed. Participants are still twinkling and Flick’ring their reflections.
One of the people I needed to catch up with this week was Sam Gladstein, cutting edge e-learning director in the Edmonds School District, and one of my earliest mentors in online curriculum development. He taught me Blackboard, but has recently been exploring Web 2.0 and Open Source possibilities that would afford more classroom collaboration, storytelling, and student and teacher ownership of content. I told him I would send him links to the work of some of the people I met at the Northern Voice conference:
Sparkler photo credit: pbouchard on Flickr
