I wrote in my last post about Music of Interest as a tool that aids the process of 'free range' discovery as you roam around the net, picking up clues and pointers about music you might want to explore in greater detail. There's an encouraging growth in these kinds of tools, each of which is modest in the sense that it seeks only to do one or two things, but to do them well.
I find out about a lot of these tools by reading Jay Cross, who has done a lot of spadework in mapping and defining the field of informal learning in recent years. (Jay's focus is on learning related to the workplace, but informal self-directed learning clearly applies even more in relation to our hobbies and leisure interests.) Jay is also an inveterate tinkerer with the latest online applications and widgets and posted recently to demonstrate the use of Trailfire for creating annotated journeys through the web.
The trails that users create with Trailfire are like those that some wild animals leave in the forest, so that their peers can more easily find the food. Or to use another analogy, they are like short stories that describe a personal journey of discovery. Much of the learning and discovery we do is by informally watching other people, hearing the questions they ask, inferring what they're looking for, and noting their successes and failures in finding it (this is sometimes called vicarious learning).
I had a stab at creating my own trail (works with Firefox and Internet Explorer only) based on my foraging for more material about Serafina Steer, whom I saw performing last week. That experience, together with looking at a few other trails on the site, taught me that creating an enticing trail — one that anyone would be interesting enough to engage a casual web surfer — is far from straightforward. Sure, you can string together a series of web pages and write some notes on each. But that doesn't make a story or a trail worth following: you could do that just as well with a static page of links like a Squidoo lens.
The user interface for Trailfire is a bit clunky, and I think it could do with further development. But it points one possible way to the next generation of tools for sharing our online 'finds', beyond del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and, of course, good old playlist sharing.
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