The reality is that I use Facebook quite a bit, but is usually something I tend to use more for personal communication. I’ve never in my life been capable of keeping up with the latest happenings in the lives of family members, people I was friends with decades ago, and occasional acquaintances I don’t really know at all as effortlessly (and regretfully with an much meaningfulness) as I have been able to since Facebook. That being said, I do experiment with features like groups and pages to understand how they work in the event a faculty member expresses interest in using it for their class. It doesn’t happen a lot though. I’ve heard of instructors using pages or groups in their courses successfully, but I haven’t seen it first hand.

It seems to me that some of Facebooks features like Groups and Pages are where the most promise are for really accomplishing anything as a community. FB Pages are well suited to serve people’s professional interests. I’ve seen companies blogging and conducting outreach to their customers using pages – and even groups. Saucony, Academic Earth, and AlaskaPhotoGraphics come to mind for this sort of use. I’ve also seen some interesting uses of groups, such as the Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market, who are announcing events and connecting to community members on FB. More of a grassroots effort in this case and FB seems well suited for it.

There are a few educator groups I’m a part of but I don’t participate in, simply because there isn’t enough time in the day. One of them (Blended Learning and Instruction) sends out regular announcements about synchronous workshops they conduct about various aspects of teaching online. They always sound interesting, and I assume someone is getting use from them, but I haven’t ever dropped in. I’m sure I’m missing out.

I’ve just recently started a new page called Winter Running just to test out the features of Pages. I’m curious how they might be used in conjunction with other platforms and where, if at all, they generate feeds (RSS) that can be pulled into other spaces people may already be using – such as re-feeding Notes posted on a FB Page into a blog somewhere else. I’ll post more about what I discover about that later.

Facebook is great for keeping visibility on a large number of interests, but I find that I have so many that I rarely follow up with any of them on FB. It seems to me to be a much less formal space and I find it very easy to ignore the traffic there for higher priority professional tasks in other spaces.

The most successful groups/communities I have seen on FB have all had great, active, and energetic community leaders who are constantly posting new content, coordinating events, and contributing back to the network. Facebook is just a tool that links people together – it is the value people bring into it that makes it useful to others, that grows communities, and that in the end, may even accomplish a goal. Without contributing, participating people it just becomes a time sink for entertainment and vampire mafiozi farmers harvesting their virtual crops.

It’s nothing new to hear about developers integrating communities and conversations between online social network services such as Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook, and the list goes on. Many of these applications have opened their APIs to developers in the hope that they will make useful tools for users of those applications. As these services and associated tools become more useful, their users increase in number. In light of this, it is no surprise to see these same applications permeating virtual worlds.

So why when talking about the permeability of virtual worlds, focus on Second Life? The biggest reasons are that the world is highly customizable and has a diverse user community already building a variety of tools that connect to other online social networks. In many cases it is possible to either buy or find free versions of these tools for your own use. A handful of them are even made available as open source code so that you can customize or extend them even further.

As educators, why are we interested in whether or not social networks are able to cross into worlds like Second Life? The artifacts created when these tools are used can be valuable to instructors and learners for a number of reasons:

• They move conversation/communication beyond the immediate community of the class and SL
• They are mechanisms for aggregating and sharing student experiences (in SL) when a cohort isn’t meeting synchronously
• They can be used to share teaching resources for other classes (promoting openness perhaps?)

Feed Display

Description: This feed display can pull information from websites and bring them in-world. If your website, blog, forum, or podcast has an RSS, Atom, or SSS feed, you can use it with this item.

Use: Open up the _config file in this object’s inventory and edit the default feed address to point to your own. You can also edit how often the script checks for new posts.

Creator: Dedric Maurac (L$19 copy/modify)

More Info: https://xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=164667

RSS Reader

Description: Display the latest headlines from your publication using RSS, RDF, Atom, or SSS (Second Simple Syndication). As residents come to your parcel, they can touch the RSS Reader to get a link to visit your publications main website. The original scripts for the RSS Reader are available with the Second Simple Syndication script and are open source.

Use: Open up the _config file in this object’s inventory and edit the default feed address to point to your own. Change the frequency the script checks for new content if necessary. You are also able to change the color of the floating text.

Creator: Dedric Maurac (L$39 copy/modify)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=122338

BlogHUD Pro 1.06

Description: This HUD is able to cross-post from the BlogHUD Pro site to your own external blog (compatible with Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Friendster, and Tumblr). It can also send snapshots to your Flickr account.

Use: Type /9 Your interesting message about your Second Life! For long posts (Title + More text/description) create a notecard in your inventory, type what you want to say then save it. Then drag and drop the notecard from your inventory to the blogHUD. It will then read the contents of the notecard and prompt you for a title to this post (type: /9 your long post title). To cross-post to your own blog add it to your BlogHUD profile and activate cross-posting on the HUD itself.

Creator: Koz Farina (L$1500)

More Info: http://bloghud.com

Slurlblogger v0.4

Description: The Slurlblogger is a device to enable one to easily keep notes of different locations that one has visited within Second Life, and easily send them to oneself for reference, or automatically to a blog. Each note will appear as a separate paragraph, with an HTML link to a SLurl for the location you were at when taking the note (or, as an option, you can turn SLurl display off).

Currently, the Slurlblogger supports posting to blogs that allow posting via the Blogger API, which includes those using Blogger, Wordpress, and Movable Type. It has been tested with both Blogger and Wordpress. Further versions of the Slurlblogger will support other systems such as Livejournal.

Creator: Ordinal Malprop (Free)

More Info: http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine

RSS330 ZEND

Description: This RSS reader is fast and it is open source. It can be adapted to various non English languages if they are available in utf8 font. It can used to read anything providing some rss feed. Current version is distributed with pre-defined languages Portuguese and Esperanto, however, they should work well for Italian, French, German. Use the instructions found in this page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/XyText-UTF8 if you have other languages you have to produce textures for. This script is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, Share Alike license and can be found at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/RSS330-Zend

Use:
Select a feed:

1. Just grab the RSS link from the page you want to be blogged in world (right click the RSS icon and then copy link location)
2. Open the content of this Feeder the _RSS330 ZEND script
3. Paste the address in the line where you read feed=”http://web.site/rss.xml”; be sure to not delete the ” ” and the ending; Remember to change the title=” “; with the title of this blog
4. That’s all the board will refresh instantly with new feed

Use the board:

1. Use the black arrows on the top line to scroll on older news and back on various pages
2. When you are interested in a news just click on that row and the news will be expanded over the board
3. Click on the board to open up the browser with the full news
4. Click on the title to go back on the title listing
5. Board will autorefresh every 10 minutes (change refreshminutes=10)

Creator: Salahzar Stenvaa (Free)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1665331

[Zone] Media TV

Description: Plays YouTube video and playlists, radio, Flickr photo streams

Use: This product does not ship with an in world instruction manual as they change often. When you rez your product you will be given a URL in local chat. This is your TV setup web page. You can find instructions, help, revision history and configuration settings on this page.

Creator: Zone Brand (L$849 modify/transfer)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=775842

Blog Reader V2.0

Description: The Blog Reader will parse and display most RSS feeds.

Use:
Rez the reader (Blog Reader V2.0) – it will show the default blog
Use the forward and back arrows at the top of the screen to move between blog posts
Use the read button at the bottom of the screen to open a web browser and read the entire post.

Note that this Reader is free and runs a PHP script on the creator’s server to parse the blog feed. If their server gets hit too much or otherwise inconvenienced then this service may be discontinued. However, the scripts for this Blog are open source, so if you want to use them, please feel free to contact him and set them up on your own server. You will need a PHP-enabled server and suitable feed parsing scripts – this Player uses MagicParser (www.magicparser.com – US$38)

Creator: Dudeney Ge (Free)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=503315

Ping.fm HUD v0.91

Description: With this little HUD you can post from Second Life to most social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Myspace, etc. All you need to do is sign up for an account on Ping.fm – http://ping.fm/ and you can Ping away from Second Life. SLURLS can be optionally automatically added to posts.

Use:

1. Sign up for an account on http://ping.fm/ and connect one or more of your social networks into your Ping.fm account. Make a test ping from the Ping.fm website to make sure it is working and that your ping appears on the social sites you have configured.
2. Get your application key for your account. Go to this page, http://ping.fm/key/ Copy the key with the long set of numbers into your clipboard.
3. Attach the HUD. Default location is top left, but it should attach anywhere. The top of the HUD will be black indicating your key is not valid yet. It will turn white once you have put in a valid key.
4. It will say your account it not validated. Enter this command on the chat line: /47 key [paste in your key here without the brackets]
5. If the key is correct it will say User ID Validated. If not, check your cut and paste and your Ping.fm account. You should only need to do this once unless you reset your HUD.
6. Make a ping: /47 ping [text I want to send but you don't have to put in the brackets] or activate the Ping.fm gesture, then if the channel is still set to 47, you can do a /ping [text I want to send… but you don't have to put in the brackets].

Supported Services:
Bebo http://www.bebo.com, Blogger http://www.blogger.com, Brightkite http://www.brightkite.com, Delicious http://delicious.com, Diigo , http://www.diigo.com, Facebook http://www.facebook.com, Flickr http://flickr.com, Friendster http://www.friendster.com, hi5 http://www.hi5.com, Identi.ca http://identi.ca, Jaiku http://jaiku.com, Koornk http://www.koornk.com, Kwippy http://www.kwippy.com, LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com, LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com, Mashable http://my.mashable.com, Multiply http://www.multiply.com, MySpace http://www.myspace.com, Plaxo Pulse http://www.plaxo.com, Plurk http://www.plurk.com, Pownce http://pownce.com, Rejaw http://rejaw.com, Tumblr http://tumblr.com, Twitter http://twitter.com, Utterli http://utterli.com, Wordpress http://www.wordpress.com, Xanga http://www.xanga.com, Yahoo 360 http://360.yahoo.com, Yammer http://yammer.com, YouAre http://youare.com

Creator: Overthruster Heavy Industries Online – Veyron Supercharge (L$150 copy/modify)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1067816

SLare Board

Description: SLare stands for ‘SL share’, so the goal is to share something from SL to RL. People can share your place in this case, with this ‘SLare Board’ to RL Social Network. Right now there are 20 popular social network in SLare Board : blinklist, blogmarks, delicious, digg, diigo, linkedin, furl, mr wong, myspace, newsvine, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, technorati, twitter, g bookmarks, netvibes, y! bookmarks, live, facebook

Use: Rez on your land. Residents can click on your SLare Board and post the location of your place to their favorite online social network.

Creator: Arjuna Nirvana (L$250 copy/modify)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1562837

diigo SLare HUD v0.1

Description: Post SLURLs to your diigo account while in SL

Use: Wear as a HUD and click the icon when you want to bookmark the location of your avatar.

Creator: Arjuna Nirvana (L$25)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1574272

Yummy

Description: This HUD posts SLURLs to your delicious account while in SL.You may optionally add a description and tags, and may mark the post either ‘not shared’ (default) or ’shared.’

Use: To post a slurl to del.icio.us chat: /111 description, tag1, tag2, …
description (optional) can be any text EXCEPT a comma and tag1, tag2, etc. (optional) are single words to use as tags.
For example: ‘/111 Great store for clothing and hair!, clothing, hair, shopping’
The tag ’slurl’ is automatically added to all posts.

Creator: Bill Hax (Free copy/modify/transfer)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=244301&random=94326

Over the past week I’ve been putting an Eee Top PC through its paces. When I first heard about the Eee Tops my first inclination was to roll my eyes at yet another in the continuous onslaught of netbook clones, but this Eee doesn’t look much like any I’ve seen before – it’s big(ger).

In reality, the Eee Top fills a niche not currently getting a lot of attention – desktops. With a relatively low price point, true to the Eee series, these machines deliver a sleek look, tiny footprint, big sound, and touchscreen interface all in a package the size of a medium-sized flat panel display. They come running Windows XP and include Asus’ own Easy Mode software with its touch-friendly interface. A short keyboard with stylus and a mouse also come in the box. The keyboard is minimalist with low-profile keys, and the mouse is a glossy hand-sized pod. Overall, the system appears very Mac-like and is very quiet too, operating at about 26dB.

Here are the official specs:

• LCD: 15.6″ 16:9 Wide Panel
• OS: Genuine Windows® XP Home
• Touch Screen: Single Touch
• CPU + Chipset: Intel Atom N270 + 945 GSE
• Memory: DDR II 1GB
• HDD: 160G SATAII 5400rpm
• Graphics: On board graphics
• Build-in Camera: 1.3M pixel Web camera
• Mic: Array Mic
• LAN: 10/100/1000 Mbps
• Wireless: 802.11 n
• Audio: 4W Hifi speaker x 2 + SRS Premium Sound System
• Microphone port in ß> Center/Bass
• Gigabit LAN x 1
• USB 2.0 x 4
• Power Supply: 19Vdc, 3.42A, 65W power adaptor
• Battery: N/A
• Net Weight: 4.3KG

The Eee Top is a good choice for homework, surfing, or display kiosk, and with its clean lines and cool blue ground effects it is something you won’t mind leaving out for the world to see. It comes loaded with OpenOffice for productivity, but could run MS Office if you prefer. The display is sharp and a good size for reading from. If you like running a high resolution and tiny text with which to create vast tracts of screen real estate, this system simply isn’t going to be for you. It’s a touch screen and Asus designed for sausagey human fingers tapping on the screen. Don’t be fooled though. The touch screen is quite accurate and when used with the stylus tasks like writing on an Elive whiteboard are quite legible.

It’s also possible to play movies IF you have an external player to connect via USB. There is no CDROM, DVD, or BluRay player on board. The picture is good, but if you think you’re going to try and get in some game time or log into Second Life, think again. The graphics card just can’t keep up with the more graphically demanding applications.

Here at CDE we are using this system to help students register for classes at the front desk and to direct them to other online resources. The entire set up is so compact that it fits on the counter without cluttering up space or blocking anyone’s line of sight. We’ve also thought about logging Barb into Skype so she can see who’s in the office and ambush people walking by (just kidding).

Image courtesy of Friprog on Flickr.

The Acer Aspire is quite a handy device that falls into the category of “netbooks”. There are numerous reviews and unboxing articles available already about the AAO, so I won’t get into the details of the device other than to say it is quite capable for its size.

A few weeks ago I was charged with setting one of these devices up – for what purpose, I was unclear – but it was a chance to work with something small and shiny with lots of buttons, and I of course jumped at it. With a wifi connection available and AC wall outlet nearby, I sat down and booted the device on for the first time. There were some screens asking my name and the region I was located in, and what language I speak. The next thing I knew, VIOLA! the device was fully operational. The entire process was truly uneventful, so much so that I went hunting for updates, which I acquired just as quickly by clicking the update button. It was already online, it downloaded the updates and installed them for me. Done.

The AAO is easy, stupid-proof even, and comes running Linpus with all the basic software to get most of your mundane tasks done. Out of the box you find Open Office, Firefox, a whole slew of games, and a few more things that are handy. The thing about the AAO is that it IS stupid-proof. I soon realized I couldn’t see under the hood, leave icons to clutter my desktop, or even right-click!

That dog won’t hunt, monseigneur. I decided immediately to remove Linpus and install Ubuntu. Why Ubuntu? Well, it’s open, free, and can do pretty things (and yes, it still runs all those boring apps so you can get stuff done).

Here a few articles that will walk you through the entire process:

Installing Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex)
Setting up Avant Window Navigator and GnomeDo
Setting up Conky
Tweaking

If you haven’t ever worked with Ubuntu or any other flavor of Linux before, fear not. There’s a large community base out there documenting tweaks and answering questions. There’s even a surprisingly large group of AAO fans out there sharing their mods. Getting rid of Linpus is the first step to really giving the Aspire One more flexibility.

Advanced Dork: Gives quick access to Google’s Advanced Operators from the context menu
Aging Tabs: Colors tabs based on the last time the page was actively viewed
All-in-One Sidebar: Quickly switch between sidebar panels, view dialog windows such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source or websites in the sidebar.
Attention Recorder: Record yor browser activity
Better GReader: Enhances Google Reader with Greasemonkey scripts. I use this to add an “add to del.icio.us” script to Google Reader.
Clear Cache Button: Clears your web cache with just one click
Colorzilla: Advanced eyedropper, color picker, and page zoomer
Colour Contrast Analyzer: examines the foreground and background colours of text nodes, and provides a report to see if they are correct according to AERT and WCAG’s luminosity colour contrast algorithm
CSS Viewer: Adds a flyout that displays CSS properties for different objects and elements on a page. Very handy.
del.icio.us Bookmarks: The Official Delicious Add-on seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us, the leading social bookmarking service on the Web
deliGoo: deliGoo searches on the sites, indicated in your del.icio.us bookmarks. With its help you can find the necessary page according to any phrase or word, which it contains
Digg This: Adds Digg This! to the right-click menu, Tools menu, and optionally the toolbar
Diigo Toolbar for Firefox: Social Annotation – a superset of social bookmarking and more
Evernote Web Clipper: provides a toolbar button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to the EverNote Application as a new note. I’m not quite convinced that I like Evernote yet
Firebug: edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: Synchornize your bookmarks across multiple computers
Gmail Space: Use Gmail as online storage
Google Send to Phone: send text messages to your phone
Greasemonkey: Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Check out http://wiki.greasespot.net/ to get started.
JavaScript Debugger: a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers
MySocial24×7 Bar: A companion to FriendFeed that allows yout to explore Everyone’s, Your Friend’s, and Your Feed
Operator:leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services
Palette Grabber: Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, or OS X based on the current page
PDF Download: lets you know before trying to open it, and then offers you choices such as downloading, opening, or converting it straight to HTML
Poster: for interacting with web services and other web resources that lets you make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type. This allows you to interact with web services and inspect the results
powertwitter: allows you to add photos from Flickr and your YouTube videos directly in your tweets. It also unwinds the tiny URL’s
Professor X:let’s you see inside a page’s head without viewing the sourcecode
Resizeable Form Fields: Allows you to resize text areas
ScribeFire: a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog
Stylish: Customize the look of the application and of websites with Stylish, a user styles manager
Super DragAndGo: Drag a link or anything like a uri (e.g. “abc.com” ), and throw it to anywhere blank on the webpage to open the it in a new tab
Tab Mix Plus: includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager
The Coop: keep track of what your friends are doing online and share new and interesting content with them
ViewSourceWith: Extends view source fuctionality
Web Developer: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools
WideFox: MOve tabs to the side of the browser for vertical display. Great for browsers that keep may tabs open
Zotero: helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources