Sharing Web browsing and sites: new tools
Several new projects help users share records of their passage through the Web.
Trailfire is a combination Firefox plugin and server. Users register pages in a sequence, then publish them to the Web. Each page in a trail can be annotated.
(For example, this Gothic literature trail)
PMOG offers a game approach to cobrowsing. It's a "passively multiplayer online game", letting users publish annotated paths through the Web. Being a game, users receive points for pages browsed, can leave surprises (pleasant or dangerous) for other players, and make continuing along a path playfully mysterious.
(PMOG annotation example)
Microsoft Research plans to launch SearchTogether, a cobrowsing project:
SearchTogether's collaboration features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat.
Steven Kaye points out that there are many cobrowsing tools and services.
Comments:
I don't think it is necessarily "wrong" to think of this as "co-browsing" but for me that misses the real power; both Trailfire and PMOG can be enabled so that simply by viewing a page (regardless of the path that brought you there) you can be notified of how it exists within this alternate strand, be it a game, a set of educational resources, a course, etc. The ability to use them both to lay trails but also to serendipitously connect with existing trails (and even more interesting for informal ed, existing people and learners) is what makes these so fascinating to me.
Comment by Scott Leslie [Visitor] 
· http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/ 03/26/08 @ 12:40
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