Below is a Slideshare presentation about Scratchpads by Vincent Smith, a cybertaxonomist from the Natural History Museum, in London. The presentation was originally given at a meeting of the Governing Board (GB15) of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Arusha, Tanzania. Vincent is no stranger to Slideshare and believe it of not, he knows Roderic Page, I blogged about Rod and his prolific eExtension output earlier this week. See what a connected place the Social Media landscape is, I didn’t know anything about these guys a few weeks ago. Now I know both by tracking keywords that are important to my industry (ringing bells … see eExtension Tip #2 – Use Google Reader to stay on top).

Anyhow without further ado here is Vincent’s presentation.

Scratchpads are an easy to use, social networking application that enable communities of researchers to manage, share and publish taxonomic data online. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered free to any scientist that completes an online registration form.

• Taxonomy
• Classifications
• Phylogeny
• Phylogenies
• Literature
• Bibliographies
• Images
• Custom Data
• Specimens
• Specimen records
• Maps

Users control who has access to content, which is published on the site under Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license.

Data added to a Scratchpad are automatically classified and grouped around a taxonomy that is supplied by the users. This is optionally supplemented with information from high quality web accessible databases, to automatic construct content rich web pages about any documented taxon. Currently these sources include Genbank, GBIF, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Yahoo! Images, flickr and Google Scholar. Source: scratchpads.edu/about

Why not head over to Slideshare now and make up of all those powerpoint presentations you have sitting around. Or if you are biologically inclined head over to Scratchpads and give it a try. Leave us a comment if you try either I’m sure other THINKeEXTENSION readers benefit from you sharing your experiences.

Tags: eExtension, Slideshare, Scratchpads, Biodiversity, Social-Media

Well fret no more!

There is a simple way to start eExtension

Social Bookmarking is a really simple way to share great online Extension content with your target audience, and to find great content others in your speciality/niche/industry have bookmarked.

Before Social Bookmarking if you found web content that was helpful, you could bookmark in your browser (the software you use to access the internet). If you wanted to share that content with others, you could email them or put a link or put the link on your website if you had one and if you could edit it.
Enter Social Bookmarking, literally hundreds of sites offer a social bookmarking service. Which allows you to bookmark great web content as you find it and store it online. That way it doesn’t matter which computer you are on, if you have internet access, you have your bookmarks. You can choose to make bookmarks private, so only you can see them or public so anyone who visits your Social Bookmarking profile or page can see them too

But wait there’s more to Social Bookmarking!

Social Bookmarking services allow users to add tags to bookmarks. Let me give you an example and explain why tagging is useful.

Let’s suppose you visit THINKeEXTENSION and think this site is a handy resource, I might like to come back here. So you bookmark THINKeEXTENSION. Now you probably have dozens of other bookmarks stored on your Social Bookmarking profile or account so to make it easy to find the THINKeEXTENSION bookmark, you might add some tags to it. Some words that describe the content on THINKeEXTENSION. You might tag it with eExtension, eExtension Strategy, Extension Techniques, and Innovative Extension.

That way in the future when you are looking through your bookmarks, you might be thinking what was that site that had an Innovative Extension approach? What was it called? It was about eExtension and eExtension Strategy so you look at your tags and listed under Innovative Extension, eExtension, eExtension Strategy, and Extension Techniques you will find a link to THINKeEXTENSION. and a short description if you have added one.

This ability to use tags is called Folksonomy. Folksonomy allows the broader web community to make online content more meaningful and more useful, it makes the internet “smarter”. It’s a way of adding participator generated meta data, which in turn informs search engines and web users. If you have content online, bookmarking it is one way to increase it’ visibility to search engines.

But wait there’s still more to Social Bookmarking!

So far you can see Social Bookmarking is a pretty handy tool, however we haven’t got to the most powerful functions yet.
Let’s suppose you manage a Horticultural Extension Program that is focussed on Integrated Pest Management. You have now been using Social Bookmarking for some time, and you have bookmarked a boat load of great content (video, photos, articles, websites) that you have bookmarked. If you know what to share this super content with your growers, you can include your Social Bookmarking profle or page in a newsletter, email, or workshop presentation. Now growers can benefit from all your research by browsing through all your bookmarks (the ones you have made public).
Here is the cool thing if you wish you can share just one tag. Or nested tags e.g. Horticulture/Apples/IntegratedPestManagement
Let’s continue with our example and suppose that you create a tag for Integrated Pest Management or IPM and tag all content related to IPM with that tag. On your profile there will be a stream of content tagged IPM that you can share with your growers. Now some of you have been reading this blog for a while might have just got a hint. When I just wrote “stream of content” you might have remembered our recent articles about RSS (Really Simple Syndication), the value of using RSS, and our eExtension Tip #2 on using Google Reader.

Well guess what?
Most Social Bookmarking sites publish an RSS feed of public bookmarks for a particular profile (like yours or mine) or a particular tag like IPM for example. Very cool, so you could show growers how to subscribe to an RSS feed of your all bookmarked content about IPM.
Once your bookmarks are published as an RSS feed, there so many great ways to use and share that data. We won’t delve into this today, but stay tuned to THINKeEXTENSION for more about nifty ways to aggregate, share and slice your web content using RSS feeds. It will literally blow you away when we show you what you can do with free eExtension tools.

What’s stopping you from starting eExtension?

If you have been sitting on the edge for a while, thinking about eExtension but not sure where to get started, today is the day to start. It will take you 5 minutes and you will start building your online asset in the next 10 minutes. There are a wide range of Social Bookmarking out there, here is a list from our resources section listing popular Social Bookmarking applications that would be suitable for eExtension. Today though we will start with just one, Delicious. Delicious is a very popular and powerful Social Bookmarking site.

Your challenge today if you don’t already have a Delicious account or profile is to sign up for one. If you do have one your challenge is to add me (eco2oh) to your Delicious network (that way you can spy on all the tasty eExtension content I bookmark).

Signing up for Delicious.

Signing up for Delicious is an easy 3 step process that is free and takes less than 5 mins. Simply go to https://secure.delicious.com/register and follow the three easy steps. They only need a username, your name and your email, it’s really easy.

Add me to your Delicious Network.

If you have signed up to Delicious they you can add me to your Delicious network, this will mean you will seek all my bookmarks including stacks of eExtension Resources. To add me to your network go to my profile http://delicious.com/eco2oh and click add to my network in the top right hand corner.

Another option would be to add my eExentsion tag feed to your RSS Feed Reader.

In the comments below leave us a message and tell on a scale of 1 to 10 how easy is signing up for Delicious.

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Google Reader is a free RSS Feed Reader that will allow you to stay on top of your industry and your niche. When used in tandem with Google Alerts to track key words in your niche and tools like Social Media Firehose, Icerocket, and Board Tracker
it becomes a power users tool. For more about RSS see What is RSS and why it’s an eExtension fundamental.

Winner of the eExtension Tip #1 Comp:

Steve Newman of Greenhouse Advisor

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Nalaka is CEO and Director at Television for Education – Asia Pacific, an organisation “dedicated to communicating sustainable development, humanitarian and social justice issues through the audio-visual and new media”.

A mission quite parallel to the role of THINKeEXTENSION, “to enable Extension Professionals develop and implement eExtension Strategies.

However what really convinced me that we are like-minded is Nalaka’s essay, Development 2.0 to catch up with web 2.0 on the ICT4D Magazine website.

The essay begins with some tales of Development Professionals dipping their toes into Web 2.0 or Social Media applications only to misunderstand the medium.

Lesson #1: eExtension requires strategy, trust and openness.

The essay continues with an explanation of Web 2.0 (see the THINKeEXTENSION version), the 2 digital divides, and then some challenges to embrace the world of New Media.

Lesson #2: In starting eExtension, there will be challenges.

(i) Leave the comfort zone of paper – most organisation live on paper however policy, technology and enviroment are moving fast.
(ii) Let go of control – this on is kind of counter intiaitve but New Media thrives on trust and trust comes from bein transparent.
(iii) Invest less money but more time – New Media is about relationships, relationship take time not money.
(iv) Recognise information needs and wants – listening is the first pillar of Social Media.

Nalaka goes on to talk about organisations using New Media in innovative ways, and call for a rethinking of the way development is done, a Development 2.0. It’s great piece and you should consider reading it. Can I join with Nalaka by saying that if we are to have healthy food and fibre and clean water, air, and a healthy environment we need new knowledge, new knowledge systems and superb extension, we need to THINK eEXTENSION.

Lesson #3: Now is time to rethink your business.

Tags: eExtension, New-Media, Web 2.0, TVE-AP,

Via eco2oh and THINKeEXTENSION I have promoted the use of Web2.0 and Social Media as tools for the salvation and prosperity of Agriculture and the Environment as a discipline called eExtension. In 2006 when I started my eExtentsion journey.

I had a number of transformational experiences online, that convinced me that the internet was about to transform the world in ways and which a velocity we could not conceive. That it would give rise to knowledge systems and community that had the power to transform.

At that time I discovered the work of Dr. Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University. In particular a Youtube video (at the bottom of this post) Web2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us. The video helped me to understand some of the changes that were taking place with the rise of the Web 2.0.

This afternoon I discovered in my RSS feed reader, a blog post from another guru from my early days online, Darren Rowse. Darren has been described as an International authority on professional blogging and Australia’s leading blogger. His post If have a spare 55 minutes and 33 seconds this weekend…. contained another video from Michael Wesch so I pretty much knew whether I liked it or not I was going to be busy for the next hour.

Boy I’m glad I watched it and I reckon you will be too. Enjoy!

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First posted here

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Tags: web2.0, DrMichaelWesch, KansasStateUniversity, SocialMedia, DarrenRowse, Problogger