Sunday, November 18, 2007

Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards

Web 2.0 Awards:
Eye-opening, Smorgasboard, Potential, Useful.

Looking at the variety in the nominees list was in some ways more helpful than reading the list of award winners, some of which were tools used in "23 Things" exercises. Just as interesting was clicking on a link and finding text such as this example:

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. As of November 22, 2007,
Findory has shut down. It was a wonderful experiment building Findory. Information personalization is in our future.

Life on the Internet is not permanent and if there is a fear, it is that I might invest beaucoup time and work to create something personalized, only to return one day and find the above text. That's a legitimate concern, yes?



My Favorite: YELP
Have something positive or negative to say about an experience with alocal business or service? Yelp is where you can go to either praise or bury the restaurant that provided superlative service or cold coffee served by uncaring staff. It is a grassroots review site that affords an opportunity to rave or condemn. Creating an account only requires name, e-mail address, password and zip code. Gender and birthdate are optional. Once you arein, you can be the food critic and more.

I'm a believer in reading posts from other consumers for items I'm considering purchasing. For example comments on the MSN car pages helped me determine that the car I wanted to buy was well constructed, reliable, and powerful enough to keep up on the highway, despite having one of the smallest engines (1.5L). And for over a year, we have been delighted with our Scion xB!

Well, as you can tell, not everyone is 100% sold on the design........

You use Yelp by finding your geographical location by place name, (the default is to the largest nearby city) and then choosing a category from a list ranging from food to financial services to public services and government. Yep--the library could be in there--Howard County locations are listed but as of yet, there are no postings. Yelp has the potential for making every customer a secret shopper.

Once you rule out the whiners or petty complainers, there is useful information that typically will not be available to consumers elsewhere. Of course, you have to build a knowledge base of more than one or two opinions/reviews to make any category useful and from what I found, the Howard County community needs to sign up and contribute.

Yelp was selected as #1 in the "City Guides and Reviews" class and while I'd heard of it and used it previously, this exercise helped me analyze its benefits and shortcomings more closely.

Other sites of note:
Clipmarks: My knowledgable and curious Assistant manager saw this and installed it on selected service desk PCs at work--months ago. A lot of the examples in the left margin ogf their homepage are a bit frivolous but it is a powerful too.

Furl: Find out what others are looking at and utilizing. "Share and save your online discoveries"
Looks like a good way of recording serendipitous "ah ha moments" as you surf.

Omnidrive: I love the idea of online storage sites and this one offers a free gig along with collaborative document editing via Zoho. Other storage options range from $40 to $199.My only concern? See the two italicized lines in the second paragraph.

Guess the Google: Finally for fun, this one was in the games category. You have a few seconds to guess the search term used to retrieve a montage of images relating to a common theme. I got a 264 on my try, flubbing the last two questions. It's a nice brain tease and I didn't end up feeling too stupid!


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