November 15, 2005
Course Profiles for MyOpenLibrary 2.0
One of the key issues related to course related MyOpenLibrary page that I didn't address in my post on MyOpenLibrary 2.0 was the problem of seeding individual students' pages with link/topic boxes related to the courses the student is registered on.
What's really needed for any institutionally supported MyLibrary service is the ability to define profiles according to topic, or subject, area, registered course and so on, that provides a default setting for, or addition to, the MyLibrary desktop.
Rather usefully - from the point of view of feeding link lists into a MyLibrary service - Netvibes shows the way forward with its ability to import OPML lists of RSS feeds:
Once an OPML file is uploaded, the individual feeds are then offered in a list of feeds, from hich the user may choose to add tem to the desktop, rather than them being added to the desktop automatically:
One other point worth mentioning here that I don't think I've mentioned before is that Netvibes allows users to place topic boxes in particular places on the desktop/canvas, albeit constrained by a 3 column grid (?or perhaps there are additional layout prefeneces I haven't come across yet that allow for even more flexibility in placing boxes?)
Related Sites
While on the topic, it's probably worth mentioning Protopage here. Protopage is another service that allows users to place tables filled with user defined links anywhere on a 'web desktop'. However, users must add each link to each table individually, which can be quite laborious...
Whilist still in v1.0 beta, version 2.0 of Protopage does promise support for RSS feeds though...
It's hard to see how Protopage can improve too much on the Netvibes model, though, apart from its 'place a table anywhere' feature. After all, these aren't services where feature overlaod would be too welcome, methinks...
Finally, Memeflow GoTo pages provide a similar offering to Protopage, but in even cruder form. Unlike Netvibes and Protopage, which are both reasonably slick, the GoTo pages are very crude and don't really offer anything over the other two...