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New social content aggregators

This phenomenon has gained enough attention from the mainstream media this year

NETSPEAK EXPLORES the latest service offerings in the realm of web based social book marking/content aggregation.

On-line social content aggregators or services based on user-generated content are fast becoming pervasive over the Net.

This phenomenon has gained enough attention from the mainstream media this year and to cap it all, the Time magazine has declared `You' as the person of the year 2006 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569 514,00.html). Here `You' means all of us participating in these `Web 2.0' services, thriving on the wisdom of ordinary netizens.

As regular readers of this column would know, NetSpeak had devoted several past issues, discussing a variety of social bookmarking services that regularly appear on the Net. Applications handling tasks such as research paper sharing, sharing PDF documents and so on are some of them. A quick roundup of the latest additions in this segment follows.

Social data publishing

In the beginning, social bookmarking services were generally developed to share bookmarks targeted at useful on-line sites/resources. On-line video services like Youtube furthered this concept by allowing the user to host her content and share its link with others. The new on-line data publishing service, Swivel (http://www.swivel.com/), is another user-powered service, where users can upload/share the content. Here, you can upload any data, explore it graphically and share it with others.

A specific feature of Swivel lies in the `Compare' tool, meant for comparing/correlating between data types. This feature illustrates the underlying relationship across different parameters (like Olympics Medals by Country vs GDP by Country). In addition, the service provides you the required HTML code for embedding a graph on to your blog or site. Besides helping you explore/navigate data published by others on a wide array of parameters, Swivel lets you upload/share your data/insights with others (see the demo here: http://swivel.com/graphs/show/2510435).

Slide Share (http://slideshare.net/), the on-line service, developed for enabling netizens share/discover slide shows on different subjects, is another of this kind tried by this author.

ProProfs WebSchool (http: //www.proprofs.com/webschool) , a user generated tutorial directory, where you can find links to various on-line tutorials on technical subjects, may serve as a good resource for picking up computing skills.

QoolSqool (http://www. qoolsqool.com/) is another social book marking service worth a regular watch. The service, created for compiling educational resources by its users, regularly displays links to educational content pertaining to topics such as business, science, health and the like. Those of you who wish to learn different technologies powering web sites may find the site Endihm (http://endihm.com/) very informative. Besides user submitted links to tutorials (pertaining to subjects such as PHP, CSS, HTML and the like), this service publishes its own content as well.

In this regard, you may also check out the people powered site, PeoplesToolbox (http://www.thepeoplestoolbox.com /web_designers/), where links to various tools meant for web designers can be found.

Yet another content sharing service accessed by this author is Shvoong (http://www.shvoong.com/), where you can write abstracts and share it with others. You can write abstracts of books, web site pieces, newspaper articles and the like. Of course, anyone can read the abstracts published on this site for free. It seems that the service features (http://www.shvoong. com/frequently-asked-questions/) a revenue sharing mechanism also. Please note that this author has not tested this aspect.

J. MURALI

He can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com

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