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Text is linear Text is unlinear Text is said to be unlinear Text is often said to be unlinear Text is unlinear when written on paper Digital text is different. Digital text is more flexible. Digital text is moveable. Digital text is above all…hyper. Digital hypertext is above all… hypertext is above all… hypertext can link hypertext can link here here or here… virtually anywhere anywhere virtually anywhere virtual The WayBack Machine http://yahoo.com Take Me Back Oct 17, 1996 Yahoo View Source Most early websites were written in HTML HTML HTML was designed to define the structure of a web document. p is a structural element referring to “paragraph” LI LI is also a structural element referring to “List Item” As HTML expanded, more elements were added. Including stylistic elements like B for bold and I for italics Suck elements defined how content would be formatted. In other words, form and content became inseparable in HTML Digital Text can do better. Form and content can be separated. http://www.cnn.com RSS XML View Source XML was designed to do just that. http://www.cnn.com/?eref=rss_topstories same withCNN.com and and virtually all other elements in this document. They describe the content, not the form. So the data can be exported, free of formatting constraints. Latest News Anthro Blogs (124) Savage Minds 8apps: Social Networking for Productive People WORLD CHANGING ANOTHER WORLD IS HERE Antrho Journals (124) University of California Press Journals Digital Publishing Current Anthropology AESonline.org Google With form separated from content, users did not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web, I’m Feeling Lucky Create Blog Name Your Blog Beyond Etext http://beyondetext.blogspot.com Choose a template Your blog has been created! Monday, January 29, 2007 Hello World! POSTED BY PROFESSOR WESCH AT 8:14 PM 0 COMMENTS There’s a blog born every half second and it’s not just text…Search YouTube Broadcast Yourself This is a video response to The Beauty of Being Human flickr Ahoy mwesch! Upload Photos Anthropology club Created by you. KSU Anthropology club Club Photos Google XML facilitates automated data exchange font-size: 14px; font-f

Clearly one of the challenges academia faces is to figure out a productive use of networks in terms of research practices. Usually I write more about the teaching aspects of the university and clearly there are many ways universities will employ networks. But I want to think specifically about the use of the web for research with a few goals in mind: to enhance collaboration between academics to publish and share research to share knowledge with a broader audience (students, governments, industries, non-profits, the general public, and so on) One might say that these have been answered, but the real challenge is that as the web continues to evolve and now converge with other networks, the practices we have established need to change as well. That is, from the inception of the web, one could find the appearance of academic journals: genuine, rigorously reviewed, academic scholarship available freely online. There were (and are) listservs that might facilitate collaboration. Similarly individual faculty and faculty organizations built websites where they offered information, policy statements, and so on (NCTE or MLA for example in English Studies). But how are we moving forward?

Conventional academic discourse lies with journals and conferences. For all the advantages of these modes, neither offers an ongoing, dynamic interchange. Listservs offer that, but, in my experience anyway, they don't really create a productive, collaborative space. Sometimes there are debates on listservs; sometimes there is sharing of information (e.g. does anyone know a good article about x"?). But there isn't a sustained building of knowledge there. I suppose there could be, but there isn't, probably b/c we all go off to write our individually authored articles and conference presentations. In any case, the listserv is too large a community for collaborative work. Yes, tens of thousands contribute to Wikipedia, but they don't all work on the same article, right? So I don't know what the magic number is, but let's say I was looking for a dozen scholars in who were interested in the same things I'm interested in: mobile networks virtual worlds audio/video production public, collaborative learning It's unlikely that we would all work on the same research project at once, but there would be a handful of project undertaken by individuals or small groups. There would be a public face to the group and a private project management site, like Basecamp. The public face would offer a steady stream of information as we shared what we were doing, what was going on in our teaching, what we were reading and writing. We'd be assembling streams of information from our blogs, twitters, flickr, YouTube, and so on--wherever we were post information. The result is a collection of information that is hopefully useful groundwork for more formal investigation and also a mechanism for fruitful collaboration between our classes.

Meanwhile, in a more private space we might be orchestrating collaborative classroom projects and sharing research, drafts, and other media: constructing our scholarly work. When it's complete, we publish it in traditional venues and republish it on our public site as well.

Diigo: sharing and publishing bookmarks with tags and little comments attached to them is nice, but providing detailed annotations directly onto Web pages is even nicer, and Diigo is definitely leading the pack there. Annotations used to require the use of a dedicated plugin with initial releases of the application, but the company listened to persistent requests from users (including myself), and developed a plugin-free version as well. Definitely worth checking if you consider your bookmarking tool as a real productivity application.

8. Ramon deSilva  |  January 16th, 2007 at 3:20 pm Ismael, That was an interesting writeup. You covered a number of sites, and offered useful capsule summaries. I’ve looked over many of the sites you mention, and used del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and Diigo. They are all good sites for bookmarking. But I think you overlooked a few points about Diigo that make it different from, and far superior to, any of the other sites. 1. As well as the ability to highlight and add sticky notes to web pages, you can collect the annotations from any set of pages (say, those tagged web-2.0-services) into a single source, with original URLs noted, to simplify your research. 2: The Diigo toolbar allows you to place all the search tools you might want, grouped by purpose, in a single button, so you can easily use multiple search tools for extensive research. The integration of this with bookmarking and annotation capabilities makes Diigo the most full-featured, capable research tool available. Diigo has other abilities; too many to list here. Overall, Diigo will save anyone who spends much time doing research on the Internet time and effort. True, you need to spend a bit of time learning all the features so you can incorporate them into your work habits, but the effort will pay off many times over. Overall, Diigo is the one service I find I cannot live without. There are other tools out there that do a nice job of this or that, and I use some of them. But Diigo is the only one I depend on throughout the day and could not live without.

How many users would like a del.icio.us++ where they can not only bookmark the URL, but also highlight specific parts of the page? Personally, I can’t live without highlighting: it helps me re-read the page, or realize that I’ve seen it before. -Laurent