Battelle has just posted about Others Online:
a new social service that pairs search users in part by their similar queries, as well as pages visitedPicture 2-17 in web browsing and preferred interests.
...
While a user is browsing they can check the Others toolbar to see who else is reading or interested in the topic or site, and a dropdown provides contact to their IM or email details ...
So what this means is.... Every time you search Google, you see the people who relate to those same keywords, plus their Web pages, and you can connect with them instantly by IM or email.
Okay - two things came to my mind immediately on reading this.
Firstly, should we make our courses (optionally) social in more than just the sense that all the students on a course are signed up to the same conferences/forums, and maybe wikis in our new courses?
For example, should students be signed up to (or allowed to opt in to (or should that be opt out of?)) IM buddy lists - with presence indicators - for other students in their tutor group or course? social bookmarking groups? Walled garden blogging communites? and so on...
Maybe we should even make a social toolbar available that easily connects students with other students in their course cohort (maybe it should have an off/off switch like an attention recorder? Hmm - maybe we could draw inspiration from the Linked In toolbar (also the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar ), something that could help in conversation building or resource sharing/social discovery?
Secondly, identifying communities on the basis of similar search profiles seemed like a neat thing to try and build in to the OCI (Open Content Initiative) environment.
So if a user is logged in to the environment, say, and is looking for particular content, then they can 'meet' other people looking for similar things?
In fact - I think a question worth asking is - do the OCI team want to build an environment focussed on the individual, or one focussed on community?
And if the answer is both, then do we need two different environments, each customised to cater for what I imagine are very different user dynamics?
(Just as an aside, I understand from here that OCI is going to be rolled out under the banner OpenLearn - hmm, as of 9th July 2006, openlearn.com is "pending renewal or deletion" and openlearn.org is parked. I wonder if I should bid for the openlearn.com domain?;-)
Posted by ajh59 at August 7, 2006 11:04 PM