WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
I was reading today about the problems of ’shallowness’ and ‘living on the surface’ for students in the 21st century. That got me thinking about George Siemens and his musings on connectivism - especially in his excellent Knowing Knowledge.
At first, the Internet truly was like the Wild West, now people have settled and formed communities. Those communities are built upon trust. Today I came across a very helpful tool which potentially should help me be able to find people whose opinion I can trust but haven’t come across before.
Lijit is a kind of ‘presence aggregator’. From their About page
When your readers search for information in real life, their first step is to typically seek out a friend for the answer. If their friend doesn’t have the answer they need, someone in that friend’s social network may. Eventually, they get an answer they trust, because it came from a source they trust. Your readers can now have that same experience on the web and it all starts with the source they trust. That source is you, the blog publisher.
The idea is that people who know you in real life and/or through your blog trust you, and therefore are more likely to trust the people you trust:
You simply enter your Twitter ID, Flickr ID, MySpace URL, blog RSS feed, etc. and it not only pulls all that together but discovers your wider network:
Another cool feature is that you can ‘find an expert’ by typing in whatever you’re interested in:
I tried ‘educational technology’ and got the following results:
(click to enlarge)
I was impressed with Lijit and look forward to exploring it in more detail. It’s not about creating gated communities, but what we do need to be doing is forming trusted network for the dissemination of good practice. Some are doing this through Ning, some through other methods. I think Lijit should be added to your toolkit!
You can find me here: http://www.lijit.com/users/dajbelshaw 
(via Chris Brogan)
Popularity: 2% [?]
Hmm. Nice tool - but if you have a Blogger blog, you have to have upgraded it to Layouts. When I previously did this, it completely scrambled my blog, and disabled all my widgets which, in spite of two solid days of effort, I could not resolve. So I switched back to the current, non-customisable format.
If I do decide to go with Lijit, I will need to set aside the time to conquer the Layout problems, and I’m not sure I have the stomach for it
Thanks for the heads-up, Karyn - it’s something Blogger users will have to take into consideration…
Doug, thanks for checking out our service and posting about us. Using Lijit for academic search purposes is something that a few of our users have mentioned and is an intriguing use of our service.
Karyn, I’m sorry to hear about the troubles that you had with attempting to install your Lijit wijit on your blogger site. I’ve included the link to the blogger help section about upgrading your blog to the Layouts format… http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=44474&topic=10274
If you have further problems, please let us know. We’d be happy to help you figure things out.
I haven’t tried the tool at all, but I will now. I really like the concept, especially the notion that it helps tie together groups and communities.
Interesting!
@Tara: Thanks for pointing that our and for the offer of support.
@Andrew: That’s what we need - we’ve got the communities together, we just need to link them in meaningful ways!
Further proof that Lijit is a great app: Tara found YOUR conversation. You didn’t have to dawdle over to their site. Further, she brought a problem that was essentially Blogger’s issue, and delivered it to your reader who had a problem.
Cool stuff, eh?
Tara: Thanks for the pointer. The problem is not with Lijit - the problem is with the Layouts version of Blogger. It disables all my widgets and the layout never looks anything like the template I create (containers appear in all the wrong places!)
Karyn, I did want to point out that if you don’t feel like messing with the Layouts version, you can still cut and paste our wijit code into the sidebar of your original Blogger template manually. Let me know how it goes or if I can help further.