THINKeEXTENSION

You might be looking at eExtension and looking at THINKeEXTENSION and thinking it looks good but how do I get started? It might be that you work for an organisation that bans employees for using Social Media sites like Youtube, Facebook, and MySpace. It might be that blogging, podcasting, and the thought of online video all scare the pants off you.

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.