20th thing

So this is the end of Web 2.0. I enjoyed learning most of it. I found many of them very useful, informative, interesting and fun. Del.icio.us, rss feeds, online image generators and avatars are some of my favorite discoveries. Some of them are things you already know that is out there in the web, but because of Web 2.0 it is a good thing we were given a chance to try and use them at work. It is also nice to know that there are alternatives to most oftenly used web services. For example, I thought MySpace and Friendster had no competition, but then I found out there's Facebook too. I would choose to participate again in another discovery program if given the chance.

Gaming

Games are fun, they do exercise your brain. It's nice that there are free games you can play online but I've never played any before. Maybe, I'll try them again if ever I get bored. I played Hollywood Jumble. It was Jack Nicholson trivia. I got 5 out of 5 questions, so they gave me outstanding. But they gave hints, so it was easy.

Maps and geotagging

Okay, after I downloaded google earth, I tried navigating the Grand Canyon. But the image was not so good so I had to change my resolution to get optimal viewing. I tried my new address too, but it looks like they don't have a picture of it yet since it's a new development area. It's cool that you can do a lot of things like tilt landscapes 360 degrees and really zoom in on buildings and roads. But it's kind of scary that one can do all these things now when you are also concerned about privacy.

Avatars

One can be really creative with avatars. You can reinvent your your look, personality, and be a completely new person in a different world. I tried signing up for Second Life but it won't take the name I picked. I guess it has to be very unique. Maybe I'll try another time when I have come up with another name. I am not sure if I would like to live in Second Life. It's virtual ofcourse and you can just do it for fun but sure you will have to have a lot of spare time to do that. Anyway, here's my avatar.

Google docs and Zoho

I like these web-based applications. They are another convenient service that people on the go can use all the time for free. I had used google docs before but I just learned about Zoho this morning. Zoho has cute emoticons you can add on your document. I don't think though that it has all the features that a word processor like WORD can offer like the array of fonts you can choose from. I still have to try all the other applications available with Google docs and Zoho.

Search engines

Search engines have certainly have made life a lot easier for people. And whatever search engine you use, one way or another you are going to find an answer to whatever question you might have. But since we are comparing the big three search engines, I did exactly the same search on: advantages and disadvangtages of hybrid cars. I tried google first and it gave me 102,000 hits and the time in seconds of how long the search was. With yahoo, they have predictive text searching. I was just beginning to type advantages, it gave me suggestions beginning with the same word and as I typed further it suggested topics after I typed disadvantages. I kind of like it because you can save time by just highlighting the topic you want. Yahoo turned up 680,000 hits on my search. Ask.com has predictive text searching also. But it's google and yahoo which gave me the information I'm looking for right on the top of the list that came up. With Ask.com though, the one on the top list was GM's link to their website. The information I needed was the second on the list. All the information is there ofcourse in the internet, you just have to know how to do all the advanced search techniques to find what you're looking for right away.

Podcasts

Podcasts--something I've heard about here and there but never tried. I browsed the list of podcasts from libraries but there was not much that interested me. Health is impt. to me and so I tried the podcast feed from the Claude More Health Sciences library of the Univ. of Virginia and added a subscription for this to my google reader. I started listening to the topic Music Heals. And then I noticed on my media player that it's 62 mins. -- too long for me so I stopped it. I picked one podcast from Learn out loud, Zaadz daily wisdom and added this to my reader too. I listened to one topic, Conquer Yourself, and it was good and only 4 mins. long. Podcasts are nice if you have time to listen to them. And yes it another useful tool for our libraries. I'm just not sure how wide the selection of topics is to get our patrons interested. I wonder if a patron is interested in sports, would there be a podcast on that subject? One has to have the time to browse all that is out there to find out.