H2O Playlist

July 15, 2005 2:44 PM

H2O Playlist: a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event. With tags, rss and other good stuff. And this time the color scheme is quite nice.
posted by signal (6 comments total)

Hm, cool. Here's a little more info on what the H2O project is up to more generally -- it's not just an in-depth news filter, though that is a neat aspect I suppose.
posted by rkent at 3:15 PM on July 15, 2005

I think this looks really cool. Just what I need to protect me from doing any real work.
posted by OmieWise at 3:32 PM on July 15, 2005

Clicking around shows that this is pretty amazing as a concept. What could be better than short list of information on a wide variety of topics that the posters are obviously interested in. It's an education in a box, a good base layer to pursue any of these topics further.
Nice link, thanks.
posted by OmieWise at 5:58 AM on July 16, 2005

I attended an excellent lunch seminar last week where the H2O team presented H2O Playlists to a Berkman lunch seminar--mostly Harvard faculty with some MIT OpenCourseware representation. Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, said the Playlists concept was inspired by observing people on the Harvard campus share music playlists on iTunes. Given the technology to publish their fastidiously collected, tagged, and organized music to their peers, some people can't resist.

The H2O Playlist system is designed to help build and share course syllabi, though it can be used for other purposes just as easily. They're starting an effort to get all the syllabi for Harvard courses published in Playlist format, and made available to the world education community. As Berkman Fellow David Weinberger wrote:

H20 is Web 2.0 compliant: Everything is tagged. All playlists are CreativeCommons licensed. It exports into RSS, with RDF and OPML on the way. An open API is under development. It's open source. Just about every cut through the site is available as an RSS feed, so you could get a feed of a particular playlist, a tag, a person, etc.

It's a very strong beta, and I'm excited to see how people use it. Big congrats are due to project lead Molly Krause, dev lead Hal Roberts, Marco Carbone, and the rest of the H2O dev team.

Personally, I'd like to hack in the ability to pick references from Del.icio.us by tag, since I had to do a lot of cut & paste to build my first playlist.
posted by hybernaut at 8:39 AM on July 16, 2005

This is classy and helpful. But why am I picking up no results for "tipping point" or "transhumanism"? I would have thought these two concepts would show up by now.
posted by NickDouglas at 10:54 AM on July 16, 2005

Nick, it's only because you haven't posted those Playlists yet!

I think it's still in beta and the number of users is just now starting to grow.
posted by hybernaut at 8:22 PM on July 16, 2005