With all the news about delicious going belly-up (or not?), it seems more important than ever for me to park some links here that I want to keep track of:
- From Mashable, a cool map showing Facebook relationships.
- Social media mashups in higher education. I think this is just a bit beyond my technical expertise for Writing for the World Wide Web, but it is something I need to figure out how to do.
- From Lifehacker, the most popular free Apple/Mac software to download of the year. I’ll sort through this at the beginning of 2011.
- Google Labs Books Ngram. This is a pretty remarkable tool for tracing the history of terms for sure. I haven’t had a lot of time to monkey with this yet, but I can imagine this as pretty darn useful.
- The TOC and a sample chapter from The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. I dunno; I might get it for the kindle so no one can tell what I’m reading….
- From ReadWriteWeb, “How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010.” It’s interesting, and maybe even something I’ll include for English 444 for the winter. They mention things like flipboard and some other iPad readers, but the biggest change for me this year in my reading habits has been using iAnnotate on my iPad for the readings I assign. Really, it’s been a game-changer and if my iPad did little more than this, it’d still be worth it.
- “Turning Blog Posts into a Book Draft,” “pedaboligical” Traci Gardner. I’ve been thinking a lot in the last couple weeks about scholarly projects– or really, the lack thereof, especially as it relates to my long stalled (and possibly abandoned) “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” research.
- Speaking of which: “99 Excuses for NOT Making Ideas Happen,” which really ends after 15. But are still good excuses to, well, get over.
- “How to Export your Delicious Bookmarks and Import Them into your Favorite Browser,” from Lifehaker. I’m not nearly as devoted to delicious as some of my colleagues, but I do use it a lot. Since I also now have mobile me, what I should be able to do is transfer my bookmarks to Safari and then synch that across my various devices. We’ll see.
- “Google Demo Slam,” which is a YouTube video of animations made only with Google Docs. Very cool.
- “App-etizing: Cookbooks and Recipes Go Mobile,” which was part of a series of NPR stories last week about apps and books. Really interesting, and to me, it is clear that publishing is going to some exciting places in the next couple years. Speaking of which:
- “Start Developing iPad Apps” from Apple and “Beginning iPad Development for iPhone Developers: Mastering the iPad SDK,” which is one of many books on this. I really would like to teach myself/learn how to do some of this sort of programming, but I have two basic problems. First, I don’t do any programming. Second, I get the impression that first it’s best to learn how to program/develop for the iPhone, which I guess I could do but that doesn’t interest me quite as much. We’ll see.
- HootSuite. I’ve just started playing around with this, but it looks like it might be a good option for handling various social networking accounts, which is something I ought to pass along to my English 444 students.
- “Google Maps & Label Readability,” from 41 Latitude, which looks to be a blog mostly about maps. I haven’t taught a visual rhetoric class (yet), but one thing I think I would do if I were to teach such a class is to frame the whole thing around maps, which I have always found to be quite fascinating. Anyway, this is an interesting (albeit geeky) analysis as to why Google Maps are the bomb.
- Two Jakob Nielsen Alertbox posts that might be useful for the directions I’m taking in English 444 this winter: “College Students on the Web,” and “Writing for Social Media.”