Scuttle is Tasty

I have been trying to use del.icio.us. Really I have. But for some reason I just couldn’t do it. I also experimented with Jots. I do like the idea of social bookmarking. It just becomes took much. I am already overwhelmed with information that I acquire from my 74 Bloglines feeds. Plus there is the look and feel of del.icio.us. The simplicity is great, and while I do like simplicity, I like some amount of style.

Then I found Scuttle (I first found it through Google, but a couple days later Tim Lauer wrote about it). It is an open source social bookmarking tool that can be installed on your own personal server. It allows you to customize the css file to control the look and feel – which is already a bit more stylish then del.icio.us.

I am already moving towards Scuttle as the bookmarks solution to my knowledge management issue (discussed in my previous post). I believe that in order for the KM project not become overwhelmed with web resources, those items need to be placed in a separate section (especially if I move towards a blog-type solution). Scuttle would allow a small group approach to social bookmarking – allowing only those who are part of the group to contribute to the world history knowledge base, but keeping it public so anyone can access and search it. Scuttle, like del.icio.us also allows you to link to all of the items with a specific tag. That link could be included in the actual knowledge management system which will contain the lesson plans, strategies, PowerPoints, etc.

My first experimentation is to use Scuttle to manage the links for the San Diego EconEd Foundation web site I manage. I have collected resource and lesson plan links related to economics education for years and placed them in traditional html based pages. The maintenance of these resources is very time consuming and searching them is next to impossible. This new tool will hopefully provide a more usable resource for economics teachers AND make managing the links more efficient on my end. I just now need to work with the board members to develop a schema of tags that will address the needs of this specific community.