1. http://www.projectsetc.org This is a growing resource for people creating interactive projects in education, technology and culture. It’s a packed learning environment offering advice on everything from a beginner’s guide to social software, accessibility guidelines and how to write good web copy. Its podcasts are really substantial too.
2. http://del.icio.us This site enables you to capture and categorise your important web destinations. No longer do your ‘favourite’ sites, as bookmarked through your browser, need to clog up half the screen. And by allowing you to look at the bookmarks of other people in your network, this becomes a hugely valuable tool for reaching parts of the web that search engines just can’t reach.
3. http://www.ted.com They say that one way to succeed in business is to surround yourself with people smarter than you are. The Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) annual conference has grown into an online community several million strong, focussing on exchanging and spreading ideas from some of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers. Sections covered include entertainment, arts and culture. Here’s to free, life-long learning!
4. http://www.wikipatterns.com Wikipedia’s success has played a huge part in more and more of us grasping what a ‘wiki’ is: it’s a collaborative website that allows anyone to create or modify its content. So it has great potential to support creative collaborations of all kinds – but how do you launch, and run, these open online spaces successfully? Wikipatterns has some great suggestions, and it’s a pick-n-mix toolbox of ideas, rather than a top-down system, which I find appealing in our age of personalised online provision.
5. http://www.pandora.com The music recommends itself! Type in the name of artists or songs you love, and this web radio station scours its vast database for tracks with similar musical DNA, and serves them up to you. It’s brought to my attention many artists and musical genres I’d never heard of before, and I’ve gone on to buy these tracks online. These web radio stations are under serious threat from punitive legislation, so now is the time to support them before they disappear.
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