I just completed a PLS class involving me trying out many of the web 2.0 technologies.  Great Class!  I would recommend it.  We learned about RSS Feeds, Blogs, Delicious, Skype, Wikis, Dropbox.com, Internet safety, and Google for Educators.

Have you ever bookmarked a favorite website at school that you wanted to get to at home, only to discover that you have no idea what the web address is? This can be very frustrating!!!

www.delicious.com can solve that problem!!! Delicious is a website that is dedicated to social bookmarking. Wikipedia describes Delicious as a place for “storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.”

Watch this video for an excellent explanation of how it all works –

If you decide to create a Delicious account, you will definitely want to add the browser buttons – http://delicious.com/help/tools (If you want them on your school computer, you will need to put in a helpdesk request.) Many teachers share their bookmarks with their students to help them find websites that are related to classroom learning.

Even if you do not create an account, Delicious is a great place to search for resources. Many educators are using Delicious and are leaving their bookmarks open to the world.

If you do open an account, be sure to follow me! My delicious “name” is – jlzurawski and the web address is www.delicious.com/jlzurawski.

Happy Bookmarking!

“Where can I go and what can I do, for the money I want to spend?”

This is an easy question for a traveller to ask, but extremely difficult for a computer to answer. If you’ve ever found the perfect hotel online, with the perfect flight, only to stumble at the perfect dates, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to find what you want.

This is where Extreme Search comes in. It’s a concept that takes innovation, inspiration, interaction, transparency, data quality and speed, and brings them together to serve the needs of people who want to travel. It enables people to query computers through their own criteria, rather than being limited to what is available. It wraps the technology around the traveller.

Affinity Shopper: extreme search in action

So, what does extreme search look like?

The answer to this question is Affinity Shopper. The first product of an Extreme Search suite of solutions.

Watch the demo:

This is a new search engine that transforms airline websites into a ‘traveller playground’. It is where consumers can explore and select their trip based on their desired holiday experience, rather than simply searching for flights along specific routes on exact dates.

Affinity Shopper enables airlines to improve their share of the leisure travel market, increase look to book ratios, boost customer retention and improve the online customer shopping experience.

Meanwhile, it enables customers to shop in the way they think, not in a linear destination-and-date way. They can now ask questions such as: “What can I do for what I want to spend? And where can I go? I want to go scuba diving, but I do not know where. And I want a beach holiday but I do not want the temperature to be above 25C.”

The Amateur-Expert Traveller: A new phenomenon, and the future of travel

At Amadeus we believe that people drive the technology, and this is borne out by our new report, called “The Amateur-Expert Traveller”.

Today, we are seeing a new generation of travellers. They have been empowered by the internet, with more information available to them, in particular user-generated information in the form of blogs, videos, pictures, ratings and reviews, and so on.

So, the relationship between travel companies and their customers is changing. Customers know more, need more, and expect more. We call them Amateur-Experts because they are often highly informed and discerning. And they present a great opportunity for the travel industry to improve to match their requirements.

Based on primary research with 2,719 travel professionals and 30 thought-leaders and senior executives from companies such as Kayak, Forrester and Qatar Airways, the Amateur-Expert Traveller report highlights three significant developments: the rise of the Amateur-Expert Traveller; the potential for massive technological innovation before, during and after a trip, which we term The Responsive Journey; and the way in which the industry is moving towards niche experiences which, again, offer huge potential for travellers and travel companies alike.

Download the Amateur-Expert Traveller Report.

Read about it in the Wall Street Journal: “Amadeus’s New Booking System Targets Leisure Travelers”.

Watch an interview with Amateur-Expert Traveller Steven Domanski:

We think the time is ripe for massive change in the travel industry. We believe there are going to be step changes in the way people use travel information, driven by the interplay between technology and human behaviour. And we say that it’s time for the travel industry to recognise this, and the potential for this, and make it work.

This is why today we’re announcing three major developments. Our concept of ‘Extreme Search’; the Affinity Shopper product which is based on Extreme Search principles; and the Amateur-Expert Traveller Report, which details the rise and rise of Amateur-Expert Travellers, empowered by the information they can find online, and how this is fundamentally changing the travel industry.

Extreme Search: humanising the technology

“Where can I go and what can I do, for the money I want to spend?”

This is an easy question for a traveller to ask, but extremely difficult for a computer to answer. If you’ve ever found the perfect hotel online, with the perfect flight, only to stumble at the perfect dates, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to find what you want.

This is where Extreme Search comes in. It’s a concept that takes innovation, inspiration, interaction, transparency, data quality and speed, and brings them together to serve the needs of people who want to travel. It enables people to query computers through their own criteria, rather than being limited to what is available. It wraps the technology around the traveller.

Affinity Shopper: extreme search in action

So, what does extreme search look like?

The answer to this question is Affinity Shopper.

Watch the below demo and see for yourself:

This is a new search engine that transforms airline websites into a ‘traveller playground’. It is where consumers can explore and select their trip based on their desired holiday experience, rather than simply searching for flights along specific routes on exact dates.

Affinity Shopper enables airlines to improve their share of the leisure travel market, increase look to book ratios, boost customer retention, and improve the online customer shopping experience.

Meanwhile, it enables customers to shop in the way they think, not in a linear destination-and-date way. They can now ask questions such as: “What can I do for what I want to spend? And where can I go? I want to go scuba diving, but I do not know where. And I want a beach holiday but I do not want the temperature to be above 25C.”

The Amateur-Expert Traveller: A new phenomenon, and the future of travel

At Amadeus we believe that people drive the technology, and this is borne out by our new report, called “The Amateur-Expert Traveller”.

Today, we are seeing a new generation of travellers. They have been empowered by the internet, with more information available to them, in particular user-generated information in the form of blogs, videos, pictures, ratings and reviews, and so on.

So, the relationship between travel companies and their customers is changing. Customers know more, need more, and expect more. We call them Amateur-Experts because they are often highly informed and discerning. And they present a great opportunity for the travel industry to improve to match their requirements.

Based on primary research with 2,719 travel professionals and 30 thought-leaders and senior executives from companies such as Kayak, Forrester and Qatar Airways, the Amateur-Expert Traveller report highlights three significant developments: the rise of the Amateur-Expert Traveller; the potential for massive technological innovation before, during and after a trip, which we term The Responsive Journey; and the way in which the industry is moving towards niche experiences which, again, offer huge potential for travellers and travel companies alike.

Download the Amateur-Expert Traveller Report.

Travel can be daunting. There’s so much you need to take into account, from the hard facts and figures of your itinerary to the feelings and opinions of people who have already been there and done that.

So we have asked Steven Domanski, one of the Amateur-Expert Travellers we identified during our research project, to outline some of his top tips for what you should be looking for. Steven is a thirty year-old venture capitalist who was born in Brussels and now lives in London. He travels regularly to the US, Europe and South America – so he knows about travel!

Here, Steven gives his take on travel tips, both from the technology perspective, and the people. And he looks ahead to a time when the two might not be quite as separated as they are now…

A checklist for travel – Steven Domanski

First, you’re sitting at a screen reading this, so it’s likely you’re looking online, right now, possibly considering how the internet can help you research, plan and book your travel.

Here are some tips which have helped me with regular travel over the recent years:

• It’s all about the price. Many of us are price-sensitive, especially during the current economic downturn, and the internet can be a great tool to help you hunt out the very best price for the travel you wish to take. Most airline websites today display the best available price during booking, which is great – but what about planning? What time is best to travel? The demand for flights and hotels can affect the price. By using websites like Farecast (the Bing Travel site) and Farecompare you can predict which months are going to cost less.
• Listen to your peers. Increasingly there are ways to check out the service levels and quality of service you should expect from other travellers. They are using forums, sites and blogs to provide feedback on the service they have received at hotels, airlines and destinations. Before I travel for leisure I usually consult blogs and forums to see what other travellers have to say. Delicious and Digg can be useful here. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, so by searching through that, you find pages that people have tagged – not computers! – which can add credibility to the results. Digg is similar, with people voting pages ‘up’ or ‘down’ in preference, so the ‘best’ pages float to the top. Again, you get consensus from people as to what is most relevant or helpful.
• Don’t settle for less. When I first started to travel, my budget meant I’d often book into hostels, but after further investigation it transpired that with a little careful planning I could have booked into a better quality of hotel under a promotional deal. The lesson for me was not to be put off by luxury brand positioning. It’s always worth a look.
• Loyalty schemes pay off. I’m a regular traveller (in the past this was often for business). By registering as a frequent flyer with my favorite airline and hotel chain I managed to amass a large number of loyalty points which translate into great value leisure trips and flights.
• Lead from the front. Of late I’ve been elected as group travel leader amongst my friends. This means booking our joint holidays and city breaks which can often be a complex process, requiring a lot of time and vast numbers of e-mails and phone calls. So, I’ve started to use travel booking applications on social networking sites like Facebook and investigated travel social networking sites like Tripmate. Some of these sites allow you to share calendars with friends and it takes the hassle out of the planning and booking stage.

I’m aware that everyone has their own personal favorites, so by all means, use every site at your disposal. And don’t forget that even seemingly unrelated sites such as Google Maps can help pin down locations, and there are many, many sites that can help with local knowledge.

There are also plenty of ratings and reviews sites that tell you in no uncertain terms what particular places are like, because they’re written by the people who have been there.

You can also take a look through blog search engines such as Google Blog Search or Technorati to find first-hand accounts that might help. Use them.

Don’t forget people!

And, at the end of the day, ask people!

This blog is called the Amateur-Expert Traveller blog for a reason. People are fast becoming experts themselves, and there’s no substitute for asking around. Those small hints and tips – for example, the best type of mosquito repellent, where to get visas, what sorts of vaccinations you might need – could help you avoid those minor irritations that can ruin any trip.

Increasingly there’s an interplay between people and technology, and this is giving rise to the Amateur-Expert Traveller. The tech seems to be empowering more people to find more experiences, and then to write about them online. I’ve already mentioned the blog search engines that might help, and blogs can be very powerful references from people who are passionate enough about travel to have written about it.

So the web is becoming an incredibly powerful way of conveying thoughts, feelings, emotions and opinions, and this can only benefit the travel industry and travellers alike.

Balance and decide

Still, it’s a balancing act. You need to balance out what you need, with what sites provide. You need to gauge how expert your advisors are. And there are probably plenty more decisions you’ll need to make, to get what you want.

Technology helps, and so do people. Amadeus looks to a future where both can work together more closely – where, instead of having to work around online systems, they work around you. Actually, it shouldn’t be a balancing act, because that takes time to learn. So for now, use the best of what’s available now, and talk to people, but look forward to a time when you get to play around, ask ‘what-if’ questions, and arrive at an itinerary without the hassle.

Social bookmarking-aren bidez, Intraneteko edo Interneteko loturak sailkatu bildu eta gorde aha ditugu. Orokorrak edo zehatzak (gai baten ingurukoak: liburuak, musika,bideoak…) izan daitezke. Baliabide hauek etiketen bidez sailkatzen dira, horrela baliabideen nolakotasuna azaltzen da.

Abatailei dagokienez, baliabideak erabiltzeko eta ordenatzeko erraztasuna ematen digu (ez hierarikoki). Gainera, fidagarritasuna erakusten du. Pertsona askok baliabide bera akeratu izan badute, informazio iturri hori fidagarria dela edo oso interesgarria dela esan nahi du. Social bookmarking-arekin, metadata kontzeptua lotuta dago. Metadata datuei (baliabideari) buruz esten den informazioa da.

Gaur egun, delicious da gai honetan zabalduenetako bat. Hala ere, badaude beste batzuk ere; besteak beste : CiteUlike eta Connotea. Berrietan ere badaude horrelakoak, entzutetsuena Digg da.

Adibidez, Diigo-k web orrialdeak sailkaten laguntzen digu, baita web orrialdeen atalak ere (nahi duzun zatia azpimarratuz). Honetaz gain, zure oharrak ere erants ditzazkezu gorde nahi duzun baliabide horri. hemen dago nola giten den azaltze duen bideoa: http://vimeo.com/6747389.

Iturriak:

• Wikipedia, kontsultaren data: 2009ko Urriaren 31, 16:03 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking
• Revista Consumer, kontsultaren data: 2009ko Urriaren 31, 16:31 http://www.consumer.es/web/es/tecnologia/internet/2008/03/14/174706.php
• GestioPolis, kontsultaren data: 2009ko Azaroaren 1a, 18:26 http://www.gestiopolis.com/feeds/que-es-un-marcador-social.htm
• UOC Open Course Ware, Kontsultaren data: 2009k Azaroaren 1a, 19:01 http://ocw.uoc.edu/informatica-tecnologia-y-multimedia/marcadores-sociales-una-herramienta-para-organizar-la-red/Course_listing

Sometimes, you know you’re seeing history in the making in a few video frames. Recently, there’s been a bit too much of it happening.

I watched in awe as the US Senate refused Bush his bailout money – the split-screen showed the politicians’ verdict and the resultant stock market crash like a horrendous parody of the loved-up Woodstock film. Politics and economics have seldom circumvented society so readily.

Likewise two more US-related events. Am I alone in thinking that footage of the majestic rise of Apollo 11 (on YouTube, specifically from 2:05 onwards) is retold in terrible rewind by the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11? The one signalled the USA’s victory over Russia in the race to space, and pre-empted the end of the cold war. The other was a truly apocalyptic event that began the never-ending War on Terror.

A few frames. They really can change the world. So I wonder – and I’m only being slightly trite here – whether a tweet could ever change the world?

You can say ‘no’, now. But consider what are the greatest tweets out there? Are there any tweets that could have been, but weren’t? Or any that were but shouldn’t? And, finally, have any of them had particular resonance or impact?

Tweets that should have been

Today – and this was the ’seed’ for this post – I read about Cerys Matthews in Guardian G2 (yes I’m a Guardian reader, can’t you tell by my appalling avatar?). She of the ability to render an audience speechless by a single thrust of the hips has come out with possibly the greatest non-tweet ever.

When asked what her epitaph would be, she responded: “Gravestones are like Twitter – you need something short that will amuse people.”

Brilliant. Maybe tweets are like gravestones? And, while she said she didn’t know what her epitaph would be, she’d inadvertently come up with a perfect epitaph. Imagine in a hundred years or so people reading it and saying “What’s this Twitter she’s on about?”

Tweets that were but are no more

Politicians should tweet more. I know about Downing Street’s twitterfeed but I couldn’t find a definitive list of political tweeters.

Maybe they don’t for this reason: In an off the record interview with CNBC, an ABC reporter, Terry Moran tweeted: “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a “jackass” for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”

Great! Hang about. Not great. The post was immediately deleted. But, as GadgetSteria points out, all tweets are cached. Never forget, the web holds everything you ever post, in perpetuity. This is both a blessing – as we shall see – and a curse.

Tweets that were and still are

The greatest tweet I ever saw, I swear is the one that set off the whole Twitter obsession.

Until Mike Wilson tweeted “Holy fucking shit I wasbjust [sic] in a plane crash!”, no one had really paid much attention to Twitter. Then The Guardian (sorry, I really do read it every day) wrote about how he’d tweeted in the immediate aftermath of a plane crash. Most people would have thought of exiting directly. Not Mike. He tweeted. Something was very wrong here. Or maybe right?

You can still see his tweet here. That’s what I meant about it sometimes being a blessing. From that one tweet, an entire scene of chaos emerges.

Then, the next thing I knew, Twitter was everywhere.

Tweets that should be famous

Consider this tweet:

“Mrs. Liebowitz’s cat has gone missing again. He answers to ‘Martin’ and walks with an unfortunate limp. This was only partially my fault.”

No? Doesn’t do it for you?

Then consider this: it was tweeted by Christopher Walken. Suddenly a seemingly innocuous tweet assumes an aura of menace. Why the limp? Whither the cat?

Why only ‘partially’ his fault?

Tweets that are famous

In my albeit brief research for this post I found that other blogs had got there first.

So, check these out:

• http://mashable.com/2009/04/10/extraordinary-twitter-updates/ – the redoubtable Mashable rounds up tweets of marriage, (pre) birth and extra-terrestriality for your amusement.
• http://www.besttweetever.com/ – is Digg for tweets. Remember: it’s either the wisdom of the crowd of the ferocity of the mob. In tweets.
• http://www.famouslasttweets.com/ – is unverifiable, probably entirely apocryphal, but good for a laugh. If only Spike Milligan had tweeted “I told you I was ill.” We’re back to gravestones again.

But none have changed the world

Did Michael Jackson’s death change the world? No. But Michael Jackon’s death did slow the web down. And there is still debate about who tweeted his death first.

Yet

Twitter is becoming our first resource when we want to know what’s happening now. That’s not just their strapline, it really is true. When Google Calendar went down recently, my first reaction was to see if other people were tweeting about it. They were. Then again, when it went down again. Then again when GMail went down.

Bad news for Google, but great for Twitter, especially as it was able to stay up while the world was tweeting about Google being down.

So I wonder: one day, will something truly earth-shaking ever be tweeted first? Will a new epoch come about because someone tweeted it? Will Twitter ever change the world?

Maybe it already has, in the aggregation of what we say – everything, all the time. But one day, whether through a mobile phone somewhere in the Tora Bora mountains, or a tweet from the first human being to set foot on Mars, maybe everything will change at one time.

What do you think?

I speak with educators frequently about not starting from a blank slate. As teachers and administrators, you are so busy that recreating the wheel is not a productive use of your time. You should consider checking out what resources are out there before you begin writing curriculum, preparing for a presentation, or designing a unit of instruction.

This is not an original concept. But so many of us worked in isolation, behind the closed doors of our classrooms for so many years, that it doesn’t come naturally to us to reach out to others for assistance. It has just been recently that so many of us have join in on Social Bookmarking, Nings and other methods of sharing resources with each other.

As I was watching this video, it linked the whole week together for me. It’s funny how as you drive in your car, or are out walking the dog, (you know, the times you actually can catch moments to think to yourself) how everything becomes somehow connected…

Will Smith says in this video “There’s no new problem you can have with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything. There’s no problem you can have that someone hasn’t already solved and wrote about it in a book.”

On Tuesday, I was listening to a middle school math teacher introduce exponents to her class. She spoke with them about the Twilight book series and the upcoming movie release. The students used their calculators to figure out how many people would become affected should one person in the class be bit by a vampire. I was impressed at how engaged they were and the teacher really made a great decision as to her choice of pop-culture connection to meet her objective.

Tuesday evening when I was doing home work with my daughters, I looked through the papers that their teachers sent home and was happy to see this. I figured that “Why I Can’t Skip My 20 Minutes or Reading Tonight?”,  couldn’t be unique to this particular school, so I Googled it and found that it’s widespread. I saw some familiar websites in the search results including the one I’ve provided from 1st grade teacher Marcy McGowan of HW Mountz School in Spring Lake. Here I was again with the exponents. The idea of how far behind my daughters would be if they didn’t complete their reading assignment each night. (Thankfully they both have a love for reading and at this point in time, it’s a non-issue.)

Friday morning I taught a podcasting workshop and would you believe it, the theme of exponents came up again as the enthusiasm exploded for just how many students and families this type of technology would be able to help int he district.

Will said “the person that works the hardest wins”.

He also said that the two keys to life were running and reading. If you haven’t watched the video yet, please take ninety seconds to watch it and then go read these books.

The Tipping Point
http://books.google.com/books?id=MMlxzMNkE_0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Disrupting Class
http://books.google.com/books?id=wiBcUl44FEcC&printsec=frontcover&lr=#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Everything Bad is Good for You
http://books.google.com/books?id=9_YZyOfgqbEC&printsec=frontcover&lr=#v=onepage&q=&f=false

I was doing some reading on social bookmarking and I wasnt sure what it was all about. I am the type of learner that need to hear and/or see things to help me understand things. I found this video on social bookmarking that helped me understand better what it is.

After watching this video I had to go and start an account with delicious. It is going to make bookmarking so much easier for me because I use two computers. I have a laptop and a desktop and this will make it easier to bookmark pages and be able to use them between to the two computers. There have been times when I had to email myself links via email so I could have them. With delicious I dont have to do that. I have all my bookmarks with me anywhere I go, no matter what computer I use.

Some other social bookmarking sites that I found are:  Backflip, BlinkList, Diigo, Getboo, Linkagogo, and Mixx. Those are just a few of the many different sites they have for social bookmarking.

Trepidatious no more
I’m sitting on the train home to Glasgow from Aberdeen after our first SHEEN Sharing Diigo training day. It was a gorgeous blazing hot sunny day. I approached this training with some trepidation. It felt a bit like Cherie and I had gone out on a limb in recommending Diigo as the tool of choice for the Scottish Employability Co-ordinators’ Network. On paper (and in my experience) it looked very close to meeting all of the ECN’s requirements, but getting people to try a new tool is something different. Didn’t feel we had much of a fall-back position if they didn’t like it, or if they found it too hard to bother learning to use.

Stoked by the chaos and keenness
Anyway, I’m absolutely stoked. I remember when I used to run training sessions on the Stòr Cùram repository, and I’d have my slides and lesson plan and handouts lined up. Then they’d see the first slide, log onto the repository, and proceed to ignore me for the rest of the session except to call out questions in a chaotic manner while digging hell-for-leather into the software. It was a bit like that today. You know it’s gonna work when they get on with it without you.

Getting started on Diigo: a community of practice in miniature
In true community of practice fashion, James (Robert Gordon University) ended up practically training Joy (Aberdeen University) under my nose, because he had already not only imported his bookmarks from Firefox, he’d installed the Diigo Toolbar and pretty much taught himself to do the bookmarking, highlighting and annotating of Web resources that is the key to Diigo’s goodness. I’d not wanted to burden participants overly before the session, and had felt guilty about even asking them to get Diigo user accounts and import their bookmarks. I wasn’t sure about how the latter would succeed, at home or in their offices with different OS/browser setups. I’ve found that Diigo can be slow and buggy when importing bookmarks from file from browsers or other bookmarking services. I also hadn’t wanted to get involved in trying to get folk to install the Diigo Toolbar until we got into the training session. The thing is, once you have the Diigo Toolbar installed, you can import your browser bookmarks in a couple of clicks, without going through the export file / import file palaver. Which James worked out for himself.

Look out future Diigo trainees: you’ll need to prepare!
Pam (St Andrews University) had also got herself a user account and imported her Delicious bookmarks (with tags intact) in preparation for the training day. She’d installed the Diigo Toolbar without realising she’d done it. It’s that quick and easy. So I have fewer qualms about asking folk to do this before the next two training sessions. I’m further pushed to this by the fact that university computer labs won’t let you install new software in the training session, so my original idea of showing them how to do it is moot anyway.

University computer labs not the best places for Web 2.0 training sessions?
Speaking of university computer labs: we had planned a 3-hour training session, of which I thought we needed every minute. Lucky we didn’t need every minute, because it took us an hour to get sorted out so we could start. First off, I’d asked those that had them to bring wifi-enabled laptops (by no means a given in the ECN)- luckily all three of today’s participants had them. Otherwise we would’ve had to let some folk use the computer lab PCs, on which they couldn’t have the Diigo Toolbar installed, which was no use at all. However, the next fly in the ointment was that the wifi signal wasn’t strong enough in the lab! So we had to go to another room, get everyone on the wifi there, after much faffing. In the end though, James and Pam were so far ahead of where I’d expected them to be, and the group was so small, we still managed to get through everything I’d wanted to cover in two hours. The next two training groups are bigger though, so I’ll need to be on the ball about making sure we have adequate technical support beforehand.

Joy of Joy: and getting quick help from Diigo
We even managed to get Joy up to speed right there in the session, even though she hadn’t had time to do any prep. It helped that she doesn’t bookmark much anyway (she relies on browser history, and Google, which I can related to!) so we didn’t have to install any prior bookmarks. She was the only one using IE though and we found that the edit bookmark popup wouldn’t appear for her when she tried to edit tags for a bookmark. I was off straight away Tweeting @diigo for help- and they responded really quickly. We didn’t get that problem solved by the end of the session but it was impressive and comforting to see how on-the-ball they were- for the participants as well as for me. We pretty much ganged up on Joy and told her to get Firefox anyway.

Sharing student experiences via Diigo Webslides and MediaWiki
Pam had asked if she could speak with me after the training to get some support and ideas around her idea for a SHEEN Sharing Student Experiences Group. She wants to better be able to both encourage students to share case studies of their work placement experiences for the St Andrews Careers wiki (e.g. see their School of Modern Languages page, with some student experiences at the bottom), and to find a better way of presenting said case studies. Well, I am certain she’s already doing a good job extracting the case studies from students, however, we both thought a little added bribe of offering a draw for an iPod or an Amazon voucher might help; I didn’t really think offering a more Web2.0ish method than the wiki form she’s already set up would help. What we did come up with was using Diigo’s Lists and Webslides feature, which lets you set up a live Web slideshow of links you have bookmarked*, to showcase the case studies (the main problem being the gnarly wiki structure which made it difficult for Pam to provide easy access to them). We examined how you can publish a Webslides List slideshow to many and varied places, and also how you can get an iFrames widget and embed it straight into a site, including, if you have the correct extension installed, into a MediaWiki page. However, we don’t yet know if her university’s IT manager will allow the latter, so she’ll be happy with the former, and just make a link in the wiki (and anywhere else she can think of). They’ve had a few issues with students not wanting their personal stories and pictures being too widely publicised, so she’ll just be keeping it on St Andrews Careers site, and she’ll be creating different Webslides shows for different subject and discipline areas. We also decided to start using the Diigo Groups feature to start an ECN discussion about collecting and disseminating student experiences.

The Twitter open plan office
Pam also mentioned that she misses working in an open plan office- she enjoyed the face to face chatting, laughing and immediacy of ideas and help today. She’s already trying Twitter: I know Cherie and I think Twitter would work much better as a virtual open plan office for the ECN (distributed as they are around Scotland) if more joined, but one thing I promised was to send her the blog post about setting up TwitterFox so she can have it at least sitting in the corner of the Web while working.

A SHEEN Sharing case study for Diigo?
Maggie Tsai at Diigo had emailed me a week or so ago asking if I could submit a case study of our use of Diigo in SHEEN Sharing. I’ve held off responding until now because I just wasn’t sure how well it would go down with the ECN group. But I’m feeling more confident now. I’ll be emailing her back this week.

* For an example of a Webslides slideshow, here’s one showcasing four examples of Netvibes and Pageflakes used for projects that I put together as a List of links on Diigo: http://slides.diigo.com/list/morageyrie/sheen-sharing-examples

*** NB: This post is an example of using Diigo to publish a Diigo List of bookmarks to any Web tool or Website.. what you see below is exactly how it appears after selecting Publish > WordPress in Diigo ***

*** This Diigo List contains the four Netvibes and Pageflakes project sites I used to show the SHEEN Sharing Development Group what kinds of things can be done with Netvibes.  They are still worth a look for that reason.  Thanks to the colleagues on Twitter who responded so swiftly and sent these  ***

SHEEN Sharing examples

Shared via AddThis

I covered social bookmarking last year.  See my post http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/week-5-social-bookmarking-and-tagging/

Over the last year, I did find myself adding items to del.icio.us when I was using Firefox browser.  I have never found the add-on to work properly when using Internet Explorer.  I didn’t use the imperial del.icio.us account at all.  I had another look at it and browsed some of the bookmarks relating to Flickr as that would be relevant to this weeks activities.

I plan to to upload my digital photos to Flickr and tag them.  I need to do this from home as that is where my photos are.

Look here (and save this URL) for details re our upcoming Diigo training days. I’ll update this page as soon as possible with further details such as maps, exact times and parking instructions. If you haven’t already done so, please email me your RSVP regarding which training day you want to attend.

*** IMPORTANT ***

*** All participants: please download and follow these instructions before coming to your Diigo training session. The instructions are to get you a Diigo account, get the Diigo Toolbar installed on your computer, and get your existing bookmarks and favorites imported into Diigo before we start ***

************************************************************

29 June, 12-3pm, Aberdeen, Robert Gordon University.

*** Update: read my reflections on the first training day here ***

Contact our kind host James Dunphy re parking or other venue queries.

Please bring a wifi-enabled laptop if you have one!

Venue details: Room A52 in the St Andrews Street Building (Aberdeen AB25 1HG). This building is around 15mins walk from the train station:

View Larger Map

21 July, 12-4pm, Glasgow, Strathclyde University.

Contact our kind host Cherie Woolmer re parking or other venue enquiries.  Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Please bring a wifi-enabled laptop if you have one!

Venue details: Computer Lab Room 6.34, 6th Floor, Graham Hills Building, 50 George Street, Glasgow G1 1QE.

We’ll meet for lunch at 12 midday in the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) in the Graham Hills Building, after which Cherie and I will take you upstairs to the main venue.

Maps from Strathclyde website in various formats here – make sure you go into Graham Hills at the 50 George Street entrance, not the 40 George Street entrance.  It’s about a 10 minute walk from Glasgow Queen Street Station, and is the same place where we’ve met with Cherie many times.  Come to CAPLE on the 2nd floor.

23 July, 10am-1pm, Edinburgh University (King’s Buildings, a wee bit out of city centre).

Contact our kind host Ruth Donnelly re parking.  Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Venue: James Clerk Maxwell Building (rear entrance), King’s Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JF (adjacent to the
Michael Swann Building).

However, it’s difficult to find the correct entrance so we will meet Ruth Donnelly and Gavin McCabe at the Michael Swann Building and they will take us to the venue.

Directions and map for the venue available here.

Teacher at work

If you often use the bookmark or favourites facility on your computer to save teaching related links to frequently used sites, or to create lists of sites you hope to re-visit one day, then probably the next logical step for you as a teacher is to spend 5 minutes getting to grips with a social bookmarking site.

VIEW SHORT TUTORIAL HERE

I’m now using and appreciating DELICIOUS (chosen simply because I had seen many references to it as I navigated the web) Check out what my page looks like here: http://delicious.com/mccandjt

The benefits are many;  you can access your bookmarks from any computer with internet access; you can bookmark any link quickly and easily; you can sort your bookmarks in a jiffy according to quick and easy tags you add; you can SHARE these bookmarks with your colleagues, – a good practice if ever there was one: and if you are really adventurous, you can share them with other like-minded teachers and harvest their links.

GO ON,  take a break from report writing and set up your account.  You won’t regret it.

I did a search on delicious for sites on organic farming and compared it to a Google search on the same thing. I found the results to be comparable, while liking the Google hit list a bit better. But what I did really like about Delicious is that you can see how many people have bookmarked each site. When the numbers of bookmarks were high in the Delicious list, I tended to want to know why, and often the site was quite good.

Thought I’d share with you my latest creation….

SHEEN Sharing started up largely because members of Scotland’s Employability Co-ordinators’ Network (ECN) were finding sharing resources about employability in a useful, sustainable way tricky. They mostly communicated via their closed JISCmail list, including sending links and resources they thought would be of interest to others. But it was hard to contextualise these resources, expose them easily to other stakeholders, or even find them again.

As a result, this project is getting the ECN set up on fabulous social bookmarking site Diigo to share resources, with Netvibes as an external dissemination route. We just had a meeting about it yesterday in fact. See previous discussions here.

Today I opened my email to find the following from the JISCmail List-Owners email group:

From Tuesday 16th June, every list homepage
(https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/yourlistname) and every posting stored on
the JISCMail online archives will include a bookmark/share button
which will have links to a selection of social bookmarking/sharing sites.

Social Bookmarking allows you to share, store, organise, search, tag
and manage webpages you would like to be able to revisit in the
future, or share with others. For example if a posting is made to a
JISCMail list that you know will be of interest to someone else you can
email a link to that person using our button. Alternatively you can
choose one of the social networking sites you are registered with, e.g.
Twitter or Facebook, to share the link with a group of people. You
might use the sharing button to bookmark a link to your list homepage
or a particular posting on a list that you can revisit at a later date on a
site such as Delicious.

I e-mailed them immediately to ask that Diigo be included in the available buttons in JISCmail. Turns out: they were doing that anyway! So let’s have a look on June 16th and see how we can make that work for us. There must be old links and postings in the ECN archives that we can bookmark in Diigo via JISCmail’s new tool. And some of us will keep sending links to the list, or receiving and sending links via other JISCMail lists, so it should be helpful into the future!

SHEEN Sharing to date: many tools, little time
Since we kicked off in January this year, SHEEN Sharing has shown Scotland’s employability co-ordinators a lot of Web 2.0 stuff, possibly to the point of overwhelm at times. This phase has been necessary just to make sure folk start getting a glimpse of what’s out there; you can’t elicit decent requirements from people if they don’t know what’s possible. We’ve also been doing a lot of listening to the ECN’s priorities, and thinking hard about ways to meet them in the short time available. We’re now ready to recommend a couple of tools, only one of which the ECN will need to “learn”.

Priority One: sharing and recommending employability resources
While our plan to work with small groups of co-ordinators and other stakeholders in trialling different social media and other Web 2.0 tools is still burbling away in the background, the most important priority is the one that brought this project into being in the first place. The Employability Coordinators’ Network want a way to share, discuss and recommend good quality employability resources, and a way to make sure those resources (and discussion on their quality and use) can be made available to current and future stakeholders. We knew we didn’t have the resource for a formal, sustainable repository, so we’ve been investigating the freely available tools out there currently which make resource sharing and recommending, and community building, easy.

A one-stop shop for employability resources: Netvibes
We’ve now established that Netvibes will let us set up a project site for free, which will allow a place for the ECN and other stakeholders to come and find resources that the ECN has shared and discussed. Netvibes does this without us having to build a website; it pulls in stuff from anywhere on the Web using newsfeeds and widgets, and presents them in any structure you like. It can also have a public face (for stuff you want to push out to different stakeholders) and a private face (just for those with logins).

I can set up the Netvibes page; we don’t need ECN folks to do anything but feed back on how that’s looking.

A place for a community to share and discuss resources, and build a wider network of interested people
We’ve also found the wonderful social bookmarking site Diigo, which does a lot more than store your bookmarks. It meets most of our requirements, for both private and public group activities around sharing, discussing, recommending and commenting on resources.

I can set up Netvibes to make public the results of this resource sharing and discussion on Diigo (only those bits we want to be public of course!). This can be done in as fine-grained a way or as broad a way as possible. For instance, we can have a section on our Netvibes pages just for “anything related to employability”, and one on some narrow topic of interest, such as PDP for international post-grads. We could have a feed out of Diigo, appearing in the Netvibes page, just for our own group discussions on third-sector voluntary placements, alongside a feed listing everything being discussed around the world on Diigo by anyone on this topic, and some individual feeds from prominent blogs and websites in this domain. The possibilities are many and varied.

Both Cherie and I have been playing with Diigo’s numerous features in the past few weeks, and we’ve both used the words “falling in love” to describe our reaction to this very cool free tool. And don’t worry: as previously mentioned, if you are already using Delicious for your Web-based social bookmarking, it couldn’t be easier to use them both with no extra effort, or to swap over to Diigo.

The next ECN meeting
We’d like to use our slot at the next ECN meeting on June 1st to show you Netvibes and Diigo properly, with some prototype stuff set up so you can get a feel for them. We’ll be taking feedback and suggestions at this point.

Training on Diigo
From there, if folk are happy with the approach we are recommending, and with the support of the SHEEN Sharing Development Group, we’d like to set up some training sessions to get folk started on using Diigo to share, recommend and discuss resources. Our hope is that this wonderful site will take over from the ECN JISCmail list as the place to go when discussing and sharing resources with other employability co-ordinators. And of course, finding resources again that you’ve previously heard about or saved.

Finally, Cherie has noted to me that one of the things she finds exciting about Diigo is the way it allows you to find other resources out there that you hadn’t previously known of, and indeed to come across other networks of people with similar interests who may be of use to you in your work.

So, ECN members: see you on June 1st! And don’t forget to drop into one of our weekly Wednesday SHEEN Sharing webinars if you’d like a preview, a taster, or any other help with anything SHEEN Sharing related!

I spent some time this week digging deeper into Diigo, to see if it is as close a fit to SHEEN Sharing requirements as it looked at first.  It’s certainly very promising, and I’d like to show it to the ECN in detail soon and recommend it as the way forward for the core work of the SHEEN Sharing project.

Diigo is like a next generation Delicious: it’s social bookmarking with the ability to also append comments and discussions on resources to the resources links, and to highlight and comment on sections of resources you’ve linked to.  Being a Web2.0 tool, you can then expose these resources, comments, discussions and highlights to other applications using feeds and widgets.  This means that the ECN can use Diigo to share resources and their experiences with them in one common place, but the results of this can be picked up and exposed in any site or repository.

This post goes into a bit more detail about how all this actually works, with special reference to how SHEEN Sharing might use it.

Web-based social bookmarking

Delicious is the widely used tool for this: instead of saving your favourites or bookmarks in your browser, you save them to your account on the website; this way, it doesn’t matter what computer you are on, you can always access them.  You can import your browser bookmarks into Delicious when you start.

• You can save bookmarks as private, or public.
• You can add descriptions/comments to them.
• You can tag them with different keywords to help you and others find them.
• You can make newsfeeds of your public bookmarks available elsewhere, for instance in your Facebook page, your Netvibes site, or on your blog.
• You can share them with your network of Delicious contacts.
• You can create feeds based on particular tags, for instance, you can make a feed of everything tagged “employability” by anyone using Delicious, or a feed just of resources you have tagged “employability”.

Some examples of Delicious feeds can be seen on this blog, in the far right-hand column.  We decided at the start of the project, as an experiment, to tag anything useful we knew of on the web about employability with the tag “sheensharing”.  We then put a feed from Delicious pulling all resources tagged “sheensharing” into the blog.  This was just done as an example, to show how social bookmarking and tagging can be used.

Diigo is a next-generation social bookmarking site.  It includes features for sharing and exposing annotations of, discussions around, and highlighted portions from resources, as well as really useful group features, allowing groups with specific interests to discuss and share resources.

Diigo: highlighting, rating and discussing resources

• You can highlight a portion of text on a website and bookmark this.  Here’s an example: I’ve highlighted a portion of a job ad relating to employability in the Guardian: http://www.diigo.com/05×64.  Follow the link and see the highlighted portion.
• You can add a comment to a resource.  This one is a different job ad in the Guardian, with a comment appended: http://www.diigo.com/05×67.  Click on “comments” in the Diigolet bar at the top.
• You can comment on a highlighted portion of text, or add a “sticky note”.
• You can expose these comments and discussions about resources publicly using newsfeeds.

Diigo lists

• You can create resource lists within Diigo.
• You can share and publish these lists via email and a number of other tools, e.g. just getting a link: http://www.diigo.com/list/morageyrie/sheen-sharing-examples
• You can generate a slideshow style presentation of the websites linked in your list, e.g.: http://slides.diigo.com/widget/slides?sid=12775
• Your slideshow can include your “sticky notes”, comments, annotations and highlights.

Diigo groups

• You can create groups within Diigo, and belong to any number.
• You can create feeds and widgets exposing groups’ shared bookmarks, including comments and discussions on the resources.
• Groups have forums for general discussions, and these forums can be exposed via feeds and widgets, or be kept private.
• Groups can be set up to auto-post to a blog: see the previous post here for an example, using a trial group I set up called “Employability”.
• You can set up a Group Tag Dictionary which recommends tags to group members, making it easier to create feeds based on tags you’ve all agreed to use for various topics.
• You can have a private group, where noone but group members can see forum discussions, comments and annotations on resources; you can also belong to public groups; when you save a bookmark with annotations you get to choose which group you are saving the comment and bookmark to, and you can edit this later.  So discussion can take place in a private group, but if you want to share something publicly you can do that too.
• Within groups, you can vote for resources (it’s a basic “thumbs up”, not star ratings, and you can’t expose these votes externally yet).

Diigo and Delicious

• You can import your browser bookmarks or favourites into Diigo.
• You can import your Delicious bookmarks into Diigo.
• You can set up Diigo so that when you save, describe and tag a bookmark in Diigo, it is automatically saved, described and tagged in your Delicious account too.  This means any existing feeds or widgets you have set up in Delicious will still work.  It also means you have an effortless belts and braces approach- if anything stops working in Diigo, it will still work in Delicious, and vice versa.

Diigo and Netvibes

We’re trialling using Netvibes as a central gathering and dissemination point for resources shared and recommended via the ECN.  Netvibes lets you put any number of “blocks” or widgets into it so it’s a one-stop-shop with little windows into feeds and pages and tools from other sites.

• You can put a block in Netvibes from a Diigo group; you’ll see resources shared publicly within that group, along with tags, descriptions, comments, discussions, and highlighted portions of those resources.
• For each resource you can either view all the Diigo commentary on the resource, or view the resource directly (you can toggle easily between these in Netvibes).
• You can link straight from that block by tag, by user, by group, and by resource, and go straight into the relevant place in Diigo.
• You can have a block in Netvibes showing a public group’s  forum discussions.
• You can have a block in Netvibes showing your resource list slideshow.
• You can have blocks in Netvibes based on feeds for specific tags, e.g. a block showing everything tagged “employability”.  This means you can have a fairly fine-grained structure within Netvibes, making it easier for visitors to the Netvibes page to find things on the main topics of interest.

Things to note

• You can’t (yet) set up feeds for groups by tag within the group into Netvibes (or anywhere much).  They are working on this, but it being a free service, no telling when it might come.
• All group activities are either public or private according to the public or private setting of the individual group so you have to make sure you set things up properly and folk understand what they are doing when they bookmark and discuss resources.
• Diigo doesn’t allow you to upload resources, it’s for link-sharing only; for those creating their own resources and wanting to share those, they would have to use another method of making the resources available online, then bookmarking them in Diigo.  Alternatively, all resources of this nature can be shared via groups on other services, and feeds and widgets from these services can also be exposed via Netvibes.
• Examples of how all this looks in Netvibes will be made available very soon.

Here, finally the lessons from the social reporting experience we had at the Rights and Climate Conference in Oslo last October. Our objective was to create a live account of the conference, so people could access and search all materials (including power points, videos and photos). A second objective was to allow interested people who could not attend in person to comment and ask questions.

Why?

• Reporting from the conference is much faster. The summaries of the presentations were usually posted within 30 minutes following the sessions and included links to the power points and other related material.
• The blog is much richer than many of the traditional conference reports, you usually get several months after an event. In addition to the sessions summaries, all the presentations and related briefs and other materials, the blog contains links to related news, short interviews, commentaries from people who could not attend the conference, and photos from the event.
• Unlike traditional reports this format allows people to participate and shape the outcome of the conference and it allows people who are not there to participate.

What?

• Sessions summaries and commentary were posted directly on the blog, which also become the central place linking to all other content;
• We also posted running commentary, questions, and information (including logistical information) for participants;
• Presentations were posted on Slideshare;
• Photos were posted on Flickr;
  
• We posted videos to Blip.tv;
• News were tagged and bookmarked on Delicious; we posted our own press releases on the blog and broadcasted them in other media outlets.
  

Lessons:

1. We had too little wo(man) power. Our conference had about 100 participants and we were two to blog the sessions. We had help to take pictures and conduct a few interviews, but had to take care of a lot of the small things like collecting an uploading the presentations which is very time-consuming. Those who live-blog or summarize the sessions should not have to do anything else!
Here are the things that need to be done:

• Live-blog or summarize the sessions;
• Conduct interviews;
• Collect quotes;
• Take pictures;
• Collect and post presentations;
• Collect and post photos and videos;
• Search and tag relevant news stories.

Depending on the size of the event one person can obviously take care of a couple of these. To minimize the amount of people you need to hire, you can train some participants beforehand. We would have liked to involve participants more, but ended up doing many of these things ourselves. One essential thing is to make it easy for participants to contribute (e.g. email in comments), but you can also integrate with the conventional reporting and use note takers to post to the blog.

2. Start discussion on the blog and other media before the conference (2-3 weeks) and help people to already contribute. Prior to the conference, we only used the blog for logistics, but not for content.

3. A good internet connection is crucial to upload all the materials and to allow participants to contribute.

4. Be aware

• Is the blog open or closed? this will influence how much participants will be willing to share; sensitive subjects will not be discussed if participants feel their commentary is not private.
• Rights to content (photos, ppts): make sure you have the rights to display all the content.
  
• New tools can be dominated by few people who use them. Just as with offline conferences (or maybe even more so), you need to support the voices that would normally not be heard. This relates to peoples comfort level, but also to their skills (computer literacy), and to their connectivity.

Additional ideas for the next conference:

This list comes from our own discussion following the conference but also contains many useful ideas, I picked up from a talk by Chris Addison:

• Build a participants wall; take pictures as people arrive and post them on a wall;
• Create Conference proceedings from blog (cut and paste);
• Ask participants to interview each other (need to have a few (cheap) cameras on hand for this);
• Get non-F2F attendees to send in questions/ comments/ expectations before the event;
  
• Integrate twitter as it is very easy to post and conversations develop easily. If you work with twitter make sure you define a unique tag (or hashtag) for your conference so others can follow the related updates more easily.
  
• Use wikis or online whitepads (e.g. etherpad) for working groups. Some of these will allow remote participants to contribute so they can not only follow the discussions but also add comments and questions.
• Communicate your conference tag to participants so that can use it for other services, such as Flickr or social bookmarking (e.g. delicious)
• Use tools such as http://www.coveritlife.com for live-blogging.

Also from Chris’ presentation here are a couple of conference reporting styles. You will most likely use a mix of these:

1. Central reporting – contractual;
2. Facilitated reporting with guidance: a few selected participants and organizers will be responsible for reporting;
3. Social reporting/ commentary: always happening, e.g. Back-to-Office-Reports; just need to find ways to tap these sources of information and commentary about your conference;
4. Integrated content production – need training to build literacy otherwise a few are likely to dominate.

Technical lessons:
The Rights and Climate Conference blog is hosted on wordpress.com, which had a couple of limitations for our purposes: the statistics are not good enough as you cannot see a geographical breakdown; people new to the platform had to get used to menus and interface, and wp.com does not allow emailing in posts, which makes it more difficult for non-tech participants to contribute.
For my part, I used ecto (a blog editor) to post my updates, since I was afraid that I would lose content blogging on the web-interface in the event of connection problems. Using ecto worked well for me, but it might also not be the solution for everyone. I do like Windows Live Writer for computers running windows.

Other Examples:

• http://educafroc.blogspot.com/
• http://www.evange-list.com/2009/03/power-shift-best-practices-in-social-media-integration-online-off/

We are very excited to announce that MetroList Services has included full Dwellicious integration with their popular public portal MetrolistMLS.com!

MetroList(r) is one of California’s largest MLS providers, in terms of membership, and THE LARGEST in terms of geographical coverage of the Golden State. Every listing on MetroListMLS.com includes the Dwellicious “chiclet”, plus a full splash page when consumers visit the site.

The Dwellicious integration was launched this past weekend and consumer sign ups for Dwellicious have been through the roof!

Read the full Press Release below.

MetroList Services adds Dwellicious to its popular MetroListMLS.com listings site.
New functionality allows site visitors to easily share properties with others.

Boca Raton, FL—(April 27th, 2009) W&R Studios announced today that MetroList Services, one of the largest MLS providers in California, added Dwellicious integration to it’s popular consumer portal, MetroListMLS.com. MetroListMLS.com currently receives over 300,000 visitors per month.

Dwellicious is a social bookmarking service that acts as a “shopping cart” for consumers as they search for properties online. With Dwellicious, consumers can easily share and discuss their bookmarked properties with friends, family, or real estate professionals. Dwellicious “smart” bookmarks will update users with any changes made to the property such as price, new photos, or whether the property has gone off the market. Bookmarked properties can also be monitored via an RSS feed.

Dwellicious.com is free service to consumers and was launched in January of 2009.

“We are thrilled to work with MetroList®,” began Greg Robertson, co-founder of W&R Studios. “We worked closely with MetroList®’s team to make this the best implementation yet of Dwellicious on a listings portal,” stated Mr. Robertson.

Visitors to MetroListMLS.com will see a Dwellicious “chiclet” on every property. By clicking on the Dwellicious “chiclet”, registered Dwellicious users create a bookmark that is stored on their personal Dwellicious bookmarks page. Bookmarks from other real estate sites can also be stored. Having all their favorite properties in one place makes it easy for users to share and discuss their home search with others.

“Social Media is an interesting new aspect of real estate,” stated Tom Beede, President and CEO of MetroList®. “We are committed to providing new tools that benefit our customers and their clients. Dwellicious is a step in that direction.”

About W&R Studios

Founded in 2008, W&R Studios (http://wr-studios.com) is a privately held web software company. W&R Studios focuses on creating the next generation of web-based software solutions for the real estate industry. By providing a “less is more” approach to software design, elegant user interfaces, and using the latest in agile programming, W&R Studios’ software applications are at the same time powerful, yet accessible to everyone. Co-founders Dan Woolley and Greg Robertson each have over 15 years experience developing and marketing software solutions.

About MetroList Services, Inc. (MetroList®)
Headquartered in Sacramento, MetroList Services, Inc. is the largest multiple listing service in Northern California. Formed in 1985, MetroList® is owned by the California Real Estate Brokers, Inc. and by the Sacramento Association of REALTORS®, Placer County Association of REALTORS®, El Dorado County Association of REALTORS®, Lodi Association of REALTORS®, and the Yolo County Association of REALTORS®. MetroList® acts as a seamless real estate information network serving more than 20,000 real estate professionals in seven counties, including El Dorado, Merced, Placer, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Yolo.