The+Changing+Landscape+-+Surfing+the+Information+Tsunami

=The Changing Landscape=
 * the central “referatory” and “repository” approaches predate Google, predate social software, and predate practices like tagging and folksonomy
 * the repository approach is also predicated on an economy of scarcity and closed-ness, one in which educational resources are locked away *inside* silo’d learning management systems and must be taken “out” and then reimported back “in” in order to be used again
 * it is well meaning in its intent and does solve some of the problems it set out to solve, yet it is hard to call it a runaway success
 * So while repositories and their affiliated approaches of metadata and federation aren’t going to disappear anytime soon and are perhaps even necessary to accomplish some functions of the academic enterprise, we are now seeing ways of discovering and sharing resources which are informed by these new practices and which take advantage of the “open web”

=New Ways to Cope=

**Social Bookmarking**

 * You’ve probably already heard of some of the benefits
 * Get your bookmarks from anywhere
 * Reuse them through their RSS feed
 * Let others see them easily
 * But in addition to this, sites like del.icio.us also let you create networks of people as well as tags
 * So for instance, in addition to being able to be [|notified of resources that everyone has tagged with a similar tag], you can easily a monitor a [|network of trusted peers for what they are finding], and easily [|"push" new finds to your network] without adding to their already overloaded email inbox
 * See also http://edtags.org/http://edtags.org/ http://www.connotea.org/ http://www.citeulike.org/

RSS feeds from repositories and other searchbots

 * Who knows what an RSS feed is?
 * Who uses a feed reader?
 * Did you know that many of these sites we’ve looked at (including SOL*R) have RSS feeds to keep track of new submissions?

Google coop, Rollyo and socially driven search

 * Cf. http://www.google.com/coop/ and http://rollyo.com/
 * Allow you to create a search engine of only specific sites
 * A dynamic example is something like this script on yahoo pipes that allows you to constrain your search to only those sites listed on a specific page – cf. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=cDtXTQ7T2xGb68CAl7okhQ