Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

On Wednesday, about 75 people crowded into a seminar room at Harvard Law to talk about H20 playlists, a Berkman project in beta that lets people build and share "lists" of online and offline resources. It grows out of projects started in 1998, including a structured forum ("Rotisserie") for mutliple classes to discuss shared readings. ("H20" originally stood for "Harvard 2.0." Hence, the 0 is a zero, not the letter O. [Later: Erica George in the comments says that it's now H_2_Letter-0, like water. Sorry!]

Jonathan Zittrain says H20 mashes together iTunes (categorization, shared playlists), Amazon.com (reviews, recommendations...and "canonical links" to books, which Zittrain thinks would be better offered by a non-commercial entity), and Wikipedia.

Syllabi are the natural content for H20 playlists. The professor lists the books in her course, and now the playlist is available publicly. Molly Krause, a Berkperson who works on H20, says that the idea is to allow people to mix and remix knowledge, not necessarily attached to a course. For example, if you search for "free tools," you'll find a playlist someone created of sites with free tools. With a click, any item on her list can be added to yours. You can see all playlists with any particular item. You can see playlists derived from other playlists.

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. (At the moment, the feed runs a search and puts the highest-ranked — not the latest — items at the top, which IMO should be changed.)

There's a reputation system built in, in part to diminish the visibility of spam.

On the plate for the next release: Collaborative playlists.

Here's a link to a search for "anthropology", just as an example.