Sense Worldwide 2.0

Here we’ll attempt to explain what all the stuff on the right hand side is. If you’re not familiar with blogs all that information can all look a bit daunting. So let’s start at the top…

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RSS

This little fella is called an RSS button. RSS, or a ‘feed’ as otherwise known, allows you to keep up-to-date with what’s published on our site without you having to visit it every day. Instead the new content gets delivered to you via your browser or feed reader. To subscribe to a feed you’ll need an ‘RSS Aggregator‘, a bit of software that can read these feeds. Some browsers have RSS function built in, like Flock. You can also get feeds with Firefox but you’ll need to download a plug-in. The BBC site explains RSS and feeds in an understandable, jargon-free way.

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Introducing Tagging

Right, before we proceed we need to explain what tagging is all about. You may well have heard it mentioned among your geekier friends - but why is it useful and what can it do for you?

A tag is basically an informal description of a site, photo, article or whatever in the form of a word. Tags are very personal. As such different people will often choose different tags for the same thing. Typically things will be ascribed more than one tag to make the classification more concise. What ends up happening when lots of people tag the same thing is that lots of different words end up being associated with that ‘thing’ which all mean different things to different people. But this then creates connections that weren’t before apparent.

The website del.icio.us was really the first site to utilise and make use of tagging to create a social network. It allows you to tag sites which in turn highlights sites other people have tagged that you potentially may be interested in. Sites like del.icio.us are known as social bookmarking sites.

This brings us to the next bit on the right hand side. Our Sense Del.icio.us list. This list shows the last 10 articles that have been tagged ’senseworldwide’ on the web with a del.icio.us account. Not just by us but by anyone. If you find something you like on the web that you think we should know about or other Sensers should know about then tag it with ’senseworldwide’ and it’ll appear in our del.icio.us list where everyone can see it. This has great implications for collaborative research. If you want to start tagging things with ’senseworldwide’ feel free.

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Sense Spaces

These links go through to other sites where we have accounts. This just allows us to share more stuff without having to build the software ourselves. If you have any of these accounts already you can link them to us and share your information with each and every Senser. We’ll just act as a conduit for everyone else.

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Our Flickr

Flickr is great for sharing photos so we’ve just put all our photos up there. If you have a flickr account go to our Flickr page and add us as a contact. Et voila hopefully if lots of Sensers do it we’ll all be able to share our photos.

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Our del.icio.us

As already mentioned, this is the place where all the interesting things we find on the web are stored and tagged. To add us to your network click here or on the link opposite to open our del.icio.us page and then click ‘add Sense to your Network’ at the top left of the page. Then we’ll all be able to see and share each others links.

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Our MySpace

We had to really didn’t we. It’s the biggest but not necessarily the best. If you do happen to have a MySpace page then add us as a friend. Our page is here

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Our Ziki

Ziki is a clever little site. It allows you to collect all your other content from around the internet and aggregate it in one place, your photos, your YouTube vids and your links. You can then connect to people through what you like.

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Our Sense Wiki

This isn’t a social network, just a place where you can look up all this jargon and try and make sense of it all. Like Wikipedia, it’s the online resource that explains the finer points of our future 2.0 web service.

If you want to ammend a page or add a new page you feel is relevant them please feel free - a collaborative effort is a lot less taxing for all the individuals involved!

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Odeo

This is an exciting one. You can leave us recorded messages on anything you like as long as you have a microphone attached to your computer. Later on we’ll find a way to publish the sound clips on the site so everyone can hear them.

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Technorati

It seems like the world and his wife are blogging these days. Which, in many ways, is good. Unfortunately, a lot of these blogs are just crap. That’s where Technorati comes in. It’s a search engine dedicated to blogs. It uses tags to make searching easier and has lots of features that make seperating the wheat from the digital chaff a lot easier.

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Gaping Void

Oh how we love Gaping Void. It has no purpose but to make us laugh.

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