H2O Playlists

H2O Playlist is a social bookmarking website created by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. Users create playlists to share sources and ideas about a specialized topic or topics. H2O is useful for exchanging academic information between students, professors and researchers.

Using H2O

After creating a free account, users post a series of links (called playlists) to books, articles, or other materials, both on and offline. These postings are available to other users, and the website automatically links similar information together by keywords. These keywords, or tags, are hyperlinks that enable users to easily and openly share their information or findings with one another.

Once logged in, users can create a library of their own links, and arrange them in different playlists. Each playlist has its own title and description that enables other users to easily find relevant or related content. These playlists can be created from individual libraries, or pulled from other playlists. If a playlist is created based largely on an idea from another playlist, it is called a derivative work.

When a user has completed their playlist, they can publish it on the H2O website for others to see and use. They can go back and edit their playlist at any time. Once published, playlists are available to the H20 community, and people outside of it.

Under a Creative Commons License, users agree that their playlists are available and flexible to everyone in the H2O community. Users can share and adapt all playlists under this agreement, but the individual sources maintain their own copyrights.

What is social bookmarking?

H2O serves as a social bookmarking tool. Social bookmarking organizes information using classification, ranking, locating and sharing. Users are expected to both share and retrieve relevant information regarding a particular topic. On social bookmarking websites, the responsibility for determining the importance of information is the task of the human users. Due to the reliance on human users, error is often unavoidable. No standards exist to guide the creation of tags, instead users provide their own personalized keywords. Other social bookmarking websites include del.icio.us & CiteULike.

External links

* [http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do Official website]