Elearning Learning and HR Tech

For some time now, I’ve been aware of a couple of projects that Tony Karrer has put together:  eLearning Learning and HR Tech Central.  On the surface, it may seem that these sites are just rollups of the blogs of experts within their repsective industries.  But they are so much more than that.

For one thing, these sites are searchable and filterable.  Say you were looking to find some news about Mzinga’s Social Learning Suite.  You can search by Vendor and then by Concept and then by Keyword, all the while narrowing the number of posts the site serves up.  Alternately, you could start with concepts, then keywords, and thereby display a list of vendor-related posts that might fit your needs.  This just scratches the surface of how you might mix and match information.  These sites are basically high-tech filtering mechanisms for the increasingly overwhelming inflow of content.

I really think Tony is onto something here.  I RSS over three dozen feeds and truthfully I don’t have time to check them as often as I should.  I just can’t keep up.  Tony’s technology enables you to see the latest topics across any combination of filters as well as the most popular topics.  If the information flow from blogs can be metaphorically described as a raging, out-of-control river, then Tony’s achievement is the web equivalent of Hoover Dam.  He traps all the good content, and then lets you decide how much or how little you need just by turning on a few simple filters.

These features would be enough to make these sites worthwhile, but he also enables you to create widgets and badges to expose this sort of power in your own site.  I’ve added these links in the right nav window so you can see how they work.  If you haven’t played around in these sites yet, you should.  They not only provide a much needed service to learning and HR professionals in the here and now, they also point to future technologies that enables us to better control and filter the vast information flow around us.