Brady Forrest over at the O'Reilly Radar points to a new project released by Yahoo Research Berkeley : TagMaps . It mashes together Yahoo Maps and Flickr Images. The interface is both extremely easy to use - mostly just point, click, drag, drop, etc. But, like so many of these tools, once you dig around a bit more, you find additional functionality. I particularly like how the "pile" of photos on the right are both clickable and editable. That is, you can move them around as if they were on your desk and if one doesn't "fit" (e.g. tagged incorrectly, you can remove it from the stack).

Today I've been doing some reading and surfing regarding Web mashups. Though I don't subscribe to Newsweek, I'm told that Newsweek already declared 2007 to be the year of the mashup. In a fine bit of syncronicity, the topic of mashups is exacly what Tim Lauer and I will be presenting on at NECC this summer in Atlanta. Our hope is to provide an introduction to understanding and creating web mashups for our attendees.

On Monday evening and Thursday evening this week, I'll be reviewing Web 2.0 technologies with a number of current and future educators and administrators at Lewis and Clark College as well as in the Beaverton School District.

Primarily, we'll be reviewing the links highlighted on the attached worksheet. My hope is to introduce all of the attendees to some of the possibilities that these Web technologies can engender for education: both as communications tools (think admin to parents or teacher to students) along with functioning as collaboration tools.

In addition to the links on the pdf, here are some additioal items we can discuss:

I noticed a few interesting things this week:

• Tim points out: ISTE on Myspace (which I believe is the second horse of the apocalypse )
• Richard Kassissieh from Catlin on using Gabcast in school (a very good thing)
• David Thornley is blogging! And pointing out some interesting Ed Tech related material from MacWorld
• Tom was hacked (the third horseman...)

Late last month, I just released an updated version the House of Peace and Love website. The HPLP is an ongoing project which was begin by Jay Boss Rubin of The Portland Challenge fame. I've chatted with him a number of times over the past year or so about developing a new website, based on Drupal, to help him and the other folks involved with this orphanage/community center in Tanzania.

I'm very pleased with how it has turned out. Please take a look, add it to your bookmarks, and give them some money...

Over the past three or four years, I've tried out a number of news readers/aggregators. Some, like pluck were pretty much just an annoyance (all the toast pop-ups were just silly) and others like Bloglines left me kind of cold. Its not that bloglines doesn't work well, rather, it just never felt all that comfortable to me. That might not make a lot of sense, but for the past year and a half I've been using Netvibes and I've come to love it.

In part, I think this is due to the fact that Netvibes allows users to turn on a few other features that I like quite a bit - namely the latest images from flickr, and a notes-space. Plus, surfing through what the developers are doing at Netvibes is always interesting.