From the creators of WebCT comes Brainify, a social bookmarking service specifically for academics.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a (scathing?) review of the service, questioning whether social bookmarking limited to academic email addresses defeats the purpose of ‘social’ bookmarking by limiting the users with whom you’re sharing.
Decide for yourself: watch the seven-minute introduction video to Brainify.
No matter what your politics, you have to be impressed with the integration of social networking around the inauguration. CNN is displaying Facebook posts beside the live video feed. There are Flickr feeds to gather photos and Twitter feeds to grab tweets. I’m sure there is a lot more out there that I haven’t mentioned (I’ve been scurrying setting up digital displays and projectors all morning). If you know of more you can share them here in the comments.
It is certainly makes the occasion more participatory.
Bart
Publication alert!
SNSTF member Melissa Rethlefsen, along with co-authors David Rothman and Daniel Mojon have published Internet Cool Tools for Physicians, which is getting alot of press in the blogosphere. Where’s the Facebook fan page?
Congratulations to Melissa, David & Daniel, for an accessible, illustrated and contemporary guide to online tools in medicine.
Last year many MLA members learned the basics of social networking software by participating in the course “Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools”. Now it’s time to take a closer look. The Social Networking Software Task force invites MLA members to participate in the free course, Dig Deeper with Social Media: short courses on emerging online tools. In this course members can pick and choose the topics of interest to them, as each short course will be offered a la carte.
MLA member feedback told us what topics were of greatest interest to the membership. Each short course is designed to take a more advanced look into a topic and may require a greater comfort level with Web 2.0 technology. Graduates from last years course and intermediate computer users will feel right at home with the new material.
The schedule will be as follows:
January 19th – 25th
Media Sharing
2 CE Credits
February 16th – 22nd
Web Collaboration Tools ( Registration required by Feb 9th)
2 CE Credits
March 9th – 15th
Wikis
2 CE Credits
April 20th -26th
Blogs
2 CE Credits
No registration is required except for the Web Collaboration Tools course, which involves group work. To participate in a short course and earn CE credit, simply complete the course work and submit your progress. All course work, important dates, and links to support can be found at the course Website http://sns.mlanet.org/snsce_advanced/. On the course site you can also join the course mailing list and we will send you email reminders for upcoming short courses, deadlines, and other helpful information. CE credits will be awarded to 2009 MLA members only. Institutional members may only have one person complete each short course for CE credit.
Disclaimer
Access to a computer with Internet on an unrestricted network is required to fully participate in the course. If you work within a restricted network, check with your workplace network administrator concerning access issues to the Web 2.0 tools utilized in the course. Participants who work on restricted networks will need to access websites from computers outside of these networks to participate fully in the course.
If you have an questions please contact Bart Ragon at bart@virginia.edu.
Well, it had to happen. With a product as good as Jing, TechSmith is ready to try and make some money off of it. The good news is that the free version is still free. If you don’t know the product, Jing is a screencapturing tool that allows you to grab images or even video of any action you perform on your computer. It even gives you some server space to easily upload your captures. I’ve found a lot of uses for it in my job.
The for fee version, called Jing Pro, promises to provide better video quality, smaller files sizes, direct uploads to YouTube, and no Jing logos. It costs $14.95 per year so it’s not cost prohibitive. It looks like the storage capacity at screencast.com is still the same 2 GB and I would have like to see that increase.  I also did not like that Jing (which loads when I start my computer) took possession of my desktop to tell me about the new version. Bad TechSmith Bad!
You can check out either version at http://www.jingproject.com/.
If you want to learn more about Jing and how it might help you in your job, just wait for my next post or check out the next MLA-Focus. There is going to be a free learning opportunity for MLA members concerning Media Sharing very soon. Hint Hint – Jing just might be involved.
Bart