Wouldn’t it be cool to let the wisdom of your crowd suggest things on the net that merit your attention? It beats threshing a barrage of chaff to locate the kernels of information you want. It’s a time-saver, time is money, and most of us could use more of it.

Enter smart aggregation. The Informal Learning Flow aggregator is beginning to take social signals into account. As Tony Karrer explains, we are using what is happening:

• with the content out in the network
• on the eLearning Learning
• searches that land on us and that occur on the site,
• and various other kinds of behaviors.

Together these social signals indicate that the content is likely of higher quality (or at least of higher interest). Thus it belongs in both a best of list and a hot list.

Hot List on Informal Learning

February 2009 Posts

• Top 10 Tools for Your Blog or Web Site
• Why Doing Things Half Right Gives You the Best Results
• Understanding Web Operations Culture – the Graph & Data Obsession
• The myth of the concentration oasis
• Ken Robinson’s The Element: reincarnating creativity
• Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy
• Crowd-sourcing a “fair use” case
• Mining The Thought Stream
• OERs shining light, new textbook model, or harbinger of a new imperialism.
• We are programmed to be interrupted.
• Usability testing on the cheap
• The Impact of Appearing Difficult
• A Guide to Social Learning
• The ‘Least Assistance’ Principle
• Cycles, chasms and the hype curve

February 2009 Keywords

• network
• social
• API
• customers
• future
• downturn
• edge
• partners
• collaboration
• generation
• Chris Pirillo
• Luis Suarez
• Clay Shirky
• John Medina
• Jay Cross

As Tony says, “I’m not always sure I can explain why certain things are going to be in the hot list for the week. The social signals seem obvious in some cases, but not always clear to me in other cases. Still I would claim that most of those posts are pretty good ones – certainly I’m happy seeing that list. Similarly, it’s interesting to see what keywords are getting to the top each week.”

You can harness the same technology to focus searches for information. Increasingly, I find myself turning to searches of known sources like these in lieu of open-ended Google searches.

Communities and Networks Connection and RSS

eLearning Learning and RSS

Informal Learning Flow and RSS and

I’m incorporating specialized searches like these into my Search and Re-search Page.