more on social bookmarking

Lisa posted earlier about del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website, so I thought I'd post about another social bookmarking site that I found via CultureCat (Clancy Ratliff's blog out of U of Minnesota). This program, H2O Playlist, is described by Ratliff:

H2O Playlists: This service is provided through the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and it has a progressive open-access, Creative Commons ethos. It's influenced by MIT's OpenCourseWare and other open education initiatives. If you watch this Flash movie about H2O, you'll see how strongly they're emphasizing teaching and learning. Users are required to publish their playlists with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses, which makes the whole site more collaborative. For example, on each playlist, there's a link that says "Create new playlist based on this one," so users can create derivative playlists with one click (and that's one way people can find each other in addition to the standard tag-surfing -- "tagging along," perhaps). Unlike most other social bookmarking tools, users can't tag one item, but rather they assemble lists of items and tag the lists. For example, I have this list on cyberfeminism. On the list, I have Faith Wilding's article "Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?" I can't tag that article, but the whole list has the tags feminism, gender, cyberfeminism, technofeminism, girlculture, cyberculture, women, femininity, and masculinity. Because playlists are meant to be kind of like syllabuses, H2O lets you break the lists into categories, like units or modules. (read more...)

I haven't played around with H20 Playlists much yet, but it looks like a really neat place to build forums, communities, and groups of resources. It works in quite a different way from del.icio.us, though. If you read Ratliff's whole post, she compares del.icio.us, H20, and another social bookmarking site.

Of note: if you're a fan of open source, Ratliff suggests de.licio.us, which runs similarly to del.icio.us, but is open source.