H2O Playlists

From Will Richardson, (check out Steve Dembo in the picture!) via Clancy Ratliffe, comes a new tool for creating lists of resources for sharing that differs slightly from del.icio.us and furl and all the others. H2O creates playlists, which are collections of online resources as well as other offline resources such as lecture notes, citations to books or academic journals, mp3 files (podcasts?), a video (digital story), or anything that supports an intellectual topic. As expected, a subscriber can have multiple playlists each with their own set of tags, and each playlist generates an RSS feed. The site is searchable for easy access to playlists of interest.

Users can also use playlists to build other playlists, although to be honest, I'm still digging through that. Each playlist is rated by its influence, so if your playlist is used to build another playlist, the influence of the original playlist within the H20 system increases. For example, check out Brian Del Vecchio's playlist on social bookmarking with del.icio.us that contains 24 resources. Listed within this playlist are other playlists built from Brian's (12 in all), playlists with the same items, as well as playlists with the same tags. So, I can see how it could be very easy to create a personal playlist by taking just the resources of interest from many playlists.

Individuals can comment on playlists and each playlist can carry Creative Commons licensing. They've thought a lot of this through....

This takes the social bookmarking site to the next level, and extends it certainly just beyond bookmarks. I'm sure we'll introduce this in our Emerging Technologies conference in Downers Grove next week with David Warlick. Tools keep emerging almost every day it seems-quite an exciting time to be involved in education with all the possibilities that access to information and people bring. So many new tools, so little time!