A distinguishing aspect to PBWorks is its industry-specific approach. The enterprise collaboration service has made a name for itself by focusing on the particular requirements of the education and legal markets. Now PBWorks is taking a smart approach by extending its position in vertical markets and offering a template store that people may download and use in a variety of business- and industry-specific ways. Sponsor The template store is opening with 25 applications, both officially approved and those developed by the community at large. PBWorks screens the templates that users provide. The enterprise collaboration space is still in its early days. People understand the importance of collaboration but often they do not know where to start. The PBWorks templates provide some framework for how to start using wikis and other forms of collaboration. The templates can include embedded media, files and documents as well as folders. PBWorks is making a smart move by offering templates. It follows a long standing tradition of providing a structure for people who are just starting to use new software or who want to improve what they are already offering. Microsoft has been doing this for years. The practice seems well suited to the increasing complex world of enterprise collaboration. Discuss

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PBWorks Offers Templates - A Great Way To Get Started In Enterprise Collaboration

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Works With Just About Anything We'll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we've got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though. If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work - check out this post , where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could. In the following 13 steps, we'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post. No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method - but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to "join the conversation" - because they aren't sure where to find the conversation. Here's how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn't a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it's a good place to start from. Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow. Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you're looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post . Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order - the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we're running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity . Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes. . These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity. So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two. Add The Feeds to a Reader We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it's easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn't matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it's the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources. We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes. Once you've got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it's time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there's more that we're going to do with these blogs. When you're in the "add feed" screen, you'll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It's really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We're now going to edit an OPML file - but don't be scared! It's easy, we promise. Anyone can do it. Pull Out Your New Tab's Feeds This step assumes you've using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that's not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step. The Top of the OPML File. Don't delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don't you feel smart? That was really easy though! Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs Now that you've got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You'll need to create an account, and the service doesn't allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that emailmarshall@gmail.com, emailmarshall+1@gmail.com and emailmarshall+2@gmail.com are all different emails - Gmail considers them the same thing? It's true, that's an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that's how you've got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file. Rank the Blog Posts With Robots! Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you'll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they've processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it's been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It's then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed. What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs' own communities of readers. That's valuable information! It's a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you'll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank! If you're interested in the Greatest Hits of Top Education Bloggers, here's the OPML file we built with the feeds we've found so far: Top Education Blogs - Greatest Hits . Just right click and save that link, then upload it to your feed reader. Banish Content Overload By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to "great" - you'll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting "best" will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you've set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step! Pretty Up Your Collection We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful. Check Out the Hotness By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog's recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work - but don't stop now, there's more we can do! You'll want to take these next steps, too. Import Into a Feed Reader Go back to your Netvibes or other reader's "add a feed" page and you'll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you'll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there's still more we can do! Make a List of the Links You Found There's a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn't in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step. Make a Reference Search Engine! Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb. Want to see what the results look like? Here's the Custom Search Engine we've got so far for Top Education Blogs .

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How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic

Dell is increasing its crowdsourcing efforts on IdeaStorm , by giving hardware manufacturers more feedback on products and services. "Storm Sessions" are designed to attract a larger business community to the IdeaStorm site, by providing a more focused, structured approach. Storm Sessions provide a way for Dell to listen to its community, but we are a bit skeptical that the effort will receive significant interest from the business community. Sponsor This may be in part due to the transparency of the process. Will business people feel comfortable giving their feedback in such a public way? Dell launched Ideastorm two and a half years ago, with the intention of giving customers the opportunity to post their own ideas about Dell's products and services. Ideastorm now has 60,000 registered users. The community posts about 300 ideas per month. The free form aspects of the crowdsourcing effort attracts a consumer crowd. Product groups at Dell find Ideastorm useful. The Linux community is especially vocal on IdeaStorm and Dell now offers Ubuntu on Dell machines based on feedback from the Linux community. Storm Sessions seek to better match business users with the community aspects of the IdeaStorm site, through a more structured process. Storm Sessions will live on the Dell site for two to four weeks. Dell is starting with two topics, covering mobile technology and the redesign of the Dell support site. Sessions are presented with a statement, providing context about the issue Dell is exploring. Each session includes a count down. Ideas are submitted through a UI that looks much like a blogging platform. The ideas then get loaded to the IdeaStorm site. Dell product groups receive the information collected from the sessions. It is analyzed and integrated into the product development process. IdeaStorm is impressive, especially considering that just two-people manage it. The amount of feedback Dell receives in return is significant, which shows the power that crowdsourcing can bring to an organization. Storm Sessions will initially focus on the education market, where Dell shows a strong presence. This could serve as the major draw for Storm Sessions. We look forward to watching the progress of Storm Sessions and how other companies bring crowdsourcing into the enterprise. Discuss

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Dell Increases its Crowdsourcing Efforts - Will it Work?

Research from Harvard Medical School has resulted in a pretty sharp SaaS learning system. SpacedEd , as it is called, uses a simple question and answer format that adapts to the person's level of knowledge. Today the adaptive technology is taking a leap into the business world with SpacedEd Enterprise , a service designed for corporations and for-profit educational groups. Sponsor SpacedEd is based upon the spacing effect, which states that people learn more effectively when presented information that is repeated over spaced intervals. Spaced Education is the company managing the technology. It conducted studies that show some pretty compelling results from training they did with doctors. For example, the SpacedEd training helped decrease cancer screenings by 26% in random clinical trials of 95 Virginia primary care providers, representing a potential cost savings of $650,000 per year in test costs alone. Here's how the service works: The learner receives course materials that are delivered electronically in a question format. People may receive questions by email, through an RSS feed or through a web site. Answers may be posted using any connected device, reflecting the nature in which people are conducting their lives. People receive two questions per day. If the person gets one of the questions wrong then it is posed again one week later. If answered correctly, the question is repeated three weeks later. If the person get it right a second time then the question is dropped from the course material. Course material is delivered to the recipient based on their knowledge level. SpacedEd Enterprise is designed for corporate clients and for-profit learning organizations. Administrators may control the access that users have to the courses. The service includes the capability to answer questions in a blog format so they may elaborate and create their own questions. SpacedEd offers a 30-day trial. Customers may use the technology on a pay-per-use basis. Discuss

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Harvard Medical School's Learning Technology Must Be Smart...Right?

Would you give a complete stranger your email address and date of birth? How about personal information about your friends? If results of a new study on Facebook user behavior is any indication, around half of us would answer "yes" to those questions, depending on how old we are. The study also shows that Facebook users are becoming more lax with protecting their personal data than they were three years ago. What do these results signify in light of recent concerns about user privacy on the world's largest social network? And now that some user data will be indexed by Google, will users have to adjust what information they share? Sponsor In the summer of 2007, Internet security company Sophos conducted a study showing how much (or little) users understood and protected the data the made available on Facebook. In this study, 200 friend requests were sent from a bogus account featuring a green plastic frog named Freddi Staur . The results were distressing. More than 40 percent of the Facebook users contacted responded to the fake account, and almost all of these users gave "Freddi" access to personal information. 72% of respondents divulged at least one email address 84% of respondents listed their full date of birth 87% of respondents provided details about their education or workplace 78% of respondents listed their current address or location 23% of respondents listed their current phone number 26% of respondents provided their IM screen name Moreover, the folks at Sophos were able to get access to users' photos of family and friends, information about likes/dislikes, hobbies, employer details and other personal facts. A company rep write at the time of the survey, "In addition, many users also disclosed the names of their spouses or partners, several included their complete résumés, while one user even divulged his mother's maiden name - information often requested by websites in order to retrieve account details." So, are users at the end of 2009 any less gullible than their 2007 counterparts? Have we learned to be less vulnerable to phishing schemes? This year, Sophos created two fake accounts - one for a cat and one for a plastic duck - and went after another 200 Facebook users, this time distinguishing between 20-somethings and middle-ages users. Here's a snapshot of the information each group revealed: Eight users friended the cat-themed fake account of their own accord, without having been contacted as part of the study; in so many words, these users pretty much volunteered to have their data phished. As Sophos noted, "Ten years ago, getting access to this sort of detail would probably have taken a con-artist or an identify thief several weeks, and have required the on-the-spot services of a private investigator." Apparently, in the 2.0 era, all you have to do is click to send a friend request, and the desire for online popularity and more "friends" makes a phisher's job easier than giving free candy to kids. Discuss

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User Data Easier Than Ever to Phish on Facebook, New Study Shows

Wrapping up a six month-long challenge to mobile developers, Google has announced a string of winners of their second Android Developers Challenge (ADC). From games and social networking apps to productivity and privacy tools, the cream of the ADC 2 crop includes an app for just about every kind of mobile user - and just in time, as the Droid has recently become " the fastest-selling Android phone to date ." Take a peek at the innovative apps waiting in the wings for the lucky owners of Android-powered devices. Sponsor As Android adoption swells and trends suggest the OS might be the second most widely used mobile OS by 2010 , it's important that the app universe keeps pace with users. Google announced this challenge in May at their Google I/O developer conference and offered well over $1.5 million in cash prizes to the winning developers in 10 categories. The applications - some of which might remind you of already popular iPhone apps - should be available shortly to Android users. The overall ADC 2 winners are: SweetDreams , a revolutionary tool that will finally allow you to go to sleep without worrying about changing your phone settings in order to avoid unwelcome late night calls. You can even use those inactivity periods to save battery power as well. What the Doodle!? , a real-time online multiplayer game where one player tries to draw out a given phrase and others try to guess it. Features FFA and Team games, Global Highscores, Personal Face Doodles, integrated Voice Recognition and more. WaveSecure , a complete mobile security solution that protects your device, data and privacy. Track your phone's location and who is using it , lock down your phone remotely, back up all your data, wipe out your data remotely, and finally, restore your data. Winners in the education and reference category are: Plink Art , an app for identifying, discovering and sharing art. The Word Puzzle , a fun way to learn basic English words for preschool children. Celeste , an educational augmented reality app that displays the Sun, Moon, planets and their paths through the sky onto your camera view. The entertainment category winners are: A World of Photo ,a casual, globally multiplayer game inspired by Spin the Bottle. SongDNA , a widget that allows you to quickly look up detailed information about a song. Solo , an easy-to-play and feature-rich pocket guitar for your phone. Winners for the arcade/action game subcategory include: Speed Forge , in which heavy duty hover vehicles normally used for mining are now seen in illegal races organized in abondoned factories and dark Marsian alleys. Graviturn , a game that makes you tilt your phone to move the red circles out of the screen while keeping the green circles. Moto X Mayhem , an app that includes seven levels of motorbike action in a side scrolling bike game. Winners for the casual gaming category are: What the Doodle!? Totemo , a unique puzzle game with over 60 mind-soothing logic tasks. Mazeness , a rather simple game involving moving balls to their goals with help of barriers, teleports and holders. These are Google's lifestyle category winners: SweetDreams SpecTrek, an augmented reality ghost hunting game that doubles as a fitness app. FoxyRing , an app that analyzes the ambient noise and adjusts the ringer volume on your phone. Media category winners are: Buzz Deck , an app that gets all the web content you care about most, along with Twitter & Facebook updates. SPB TV , a highly usable IP-TV application optimized to run on mobile devices. FxCamera , which lets you take pictures with various effects. Here are the winning productivity tools: WaveSecure Hoccer , an application for gesture-based ad-hoc data exchange. Tasker , an app that lets users link any Task (action set) to the Contexts (application, time, day, location, event, widget press) where it should run. In social networking, the winners are: Ce:real , an app that displays geographically based, real-world trends, including photo stories paired with Twitter keywords. SocialMuse , which lets users find people with similar musical taste or just explore the world through music. SpotMessage , a communication tool using GPS. Send a message designating a spot with Google Maps then the message will be notified when the recipient arrives at the spot. For the travel category, Google name these top apps: Trip Journal , a trip tracking and sharing solution sending real-time updates from the places you are visiting. iNap: Arrival Alert , an application that allows traveling users to sleep (or work, or just zone out) then relies on GPS to alert them with an alarm when the destination is nearby. Car Locator , which navigates you back to your car should you ever have trouble finding it. Finally, here are three miscellaneous winners: Rhythm Guitar , which plays like a real 6-string, 5-fret guitar. Andrometer , and app that measures the approximate distance from you to an object that you can see using GPS, accelerometer and geomagnetic sensors. Calton Hill GPSCaddy , an app that allows golfers to quickly and easily map any golf course either out on the course using GPS or in the comfort of home using satellite imagery. Bonus Round: See our picks from last year's ADC !) Let us know in the comments what you think of this year's winners (too many iPhone app clones? too little augmented reality?) in the comments - and definitely tell us what you'd like to see Android developers tackle next! Discuss

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Google Names 30 Best Mobile Apps for Android