Have you seen the Newsweek cover article on Web 2.0. Here’s a sample:
“The massive success of MySpace and the exemplary strategy of Flickr are milestones in a new high-tech wave reminiscent of the craziness of the early dot-com days. This rebooting owes everything to the enhanced power and pervasiveness of the Web, which has finally matured to the point where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in the ’90s. The generic term for this movement, especially among the hundreds of new companies jamming the waiting rooms of venture-capital offices, is Web 2.0, but that’s misleading—some supposedly Web 1.0 companies like eBay and Google have been clueful about this all along.”
The day two assignment for my online blogs workshop is to create a blog using Blogger. Here’s the results. (Obviously some are thinking that their work is for the long-term while others are not.)
Brian Matthers, a reference librarian at Georgia Tech has released the preliminary results of an experiment in using student blogs to find library patrons. From his blog:
“Essentially, the paper describes a proactive approach toward interacting with college students. While the library world has just discovered blogs, these students have been keeping online journals for years. They use services like LiveJournal and Xanga, and even MySpace and Facebook to interact×often providing insight and commentary on their hectic lives. My interest was mining this data for educational opportunities.”
What he did was read his students’ blogs and looked for opportunities to respond via comments giving them assistance and guiding them to library resources. The four-page summary is something every librarian must read. (There’s also a screencast available.)
Now that is Library 2.0!
Mother Jones has a great list of funny IP law related stories. My favorite one is:
FOR INCLUDING a 60-second piece of silence on their album, the Planets were threatened with a lawsuit by the estate of composer John Cage, which said they’d ripped off his silent work 4’33”. The Planets countered that the estate failed to specify which 60 of the 273 seconds in Cage’s piece had been pilfered.
Today I won a prize in an online contest for Caribou Coffee. My prize was a free drink of my choice and I was informed that I would be notified via e-mail later in the day. Within the hour I received the confirmation e-mail which, I assumed since it was the result of an online contest it would contain the information needed for me to receive my drink. Instead I was informed that I would “receive your gift certificate in the mail 8-10 weeks after the end of the promotion. It will be mailed to the address you provided on the registration form. The promotion ends on April 7, 2006.” So, enter an online contest, receive your prize (a coupon) about three months later. What’s up with that?
Google current takes on viral videos on the Internet. (If you’ve never watched Google current this is a great introductory episode.)
Web site usability from a frog’s point of view. (Funny yet, very accurate.)
Thanks Darlene
As someone who rarely has a full larder, I’d love a way to enter the ingredients I have and find a recipie to match. Well, with Allrecipes’ Recipe Ingredient Search I can do just that.
This video teachs gamers not to abuse their characters.
