Serendipity35

Megite Discover is a crowdsourcing service for web browsing provided by Megite, a social news aggregator. The idea is that you put in a web address and it provides relevant links of related interest. That would be a useful tool for students doing research. If it works it might pull up related areas that an ordinary search wouldn't find.

So, I asked it for connections to Serendipity35. An encouraging first look: the keywords it finds are "education" and "college." Not exactly what we try to be, but a reasonable starting place.

For connections it gives me Free Online MIT Course Materials,which makes sense, Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better ,so it must be channeling Tim's posts, 20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books, a topic we have addressed. It connected with Scratch, the programming tool for younger students from MIT that I have written about, and it also offers broader related links to each URL. For Scratch, it offers programming, free, software animation - all valid connections. Next comes Massive List of Free Education Online For Autodidacts - perfect for the Serendipity35 readers who we know are lifelong autodidacts! And there are some oddities like Tableau Périodique (French Periodic Table). Then back in line with a University Podcast Collection.

Then I put my poetry site to the test. Discover brings up writing as the keyword - which is good - but the associated links are about writing in general and not really about poetry specifically: About 100 Words, widgets for poetry generation, great novel generation, and everything in between, MLA Formatting and Style Guide, Son of Citation Machine ,Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing.

One last test. I entered the college URL (http://pccc.edu) and I get NOTHING! So I tried NJIT. That one comes ups with many links - but mostly to the college's own site (including Serendipity35). Hmmm...

How different is this from other tools that do similar kinds of matches? the easiest one for me to use is built right into the Google Toolbar.

For any page that I am viewing, I can click the "Page Rank" button and look at "Similar Pages" and "Backward Links"' (sites that link to the site you're viewing - useful to webmasters & blog owners to check who is linking to your site).

How does my PCCC test work with the Google tool? My first try drew another blank. Very odd. So, I tried using www.pccc.edu and there were lots of links (including Serendipity35 right at the top of the page because of some mentions of PCCC I have made). Hmmm#2. Let's try the www.pccc.edu path on Megite Discover. No go - still no connections.

Megite Discover did turn up broader connections and categories of related links than Google, but almost too broad. Obviously it has not indexed PCCC - a serious flaw for us - and it doesn't offer backward links or the cached snapshot of the way the page looked when Google last cached that URL (it seems to show yesterdays post when I check this blog). I'll have to give the advantage to the Google Toolbar on this round, but it's interesting to see tools that offer a way for students and teachers to find related areas and links you might not have thought to use. I'm still having some trouble figuring out that French periodic chart? Could it have known that my wife taught French? Now THAT would be an amazing tool.