Week 10, Thing 20: Web 2.0 awards

#20 Explore any site from the Web 2.0 awards list, play with it, and write a blog post about your findings.

I decided to check out the "short" list of award winners first, rather than the comprehensive list of nominees. (The more comprehensive list, which includes honorable mentions, is annotated, though, which is helpful.) I noticed a number of sites on the list that I have already visited, some because of the 23 Things, like Technorati, Library Thing, Google Docs, Del.icio.us, Flickr, pbWiki, etc.; and some i have used completely independent of this course, like Google Maps. I looked briefly at a few, like the bookmarking site Ma.gnolia, but since I already have a Del.icio.us account I wasn't ready to join Ma.gnolia in order to fully explore it and see what might be different (perhaps better) than Del.icio.us. The winner in the Books category, Lulu, is a totally different type of thing than Library thing, which was the second place winner. Lulu is for creating publications, selling them, or purchasing those of others. I found it interesting that two such different applications were winners in the same category. I appreciated that Lulu had a video tour that let me see what it did without having to join.

I looked at Meebo, which is web-based instant messaging that lets you "chat with your buddies on every major IM network in a single buddylist." I can definitely see the value in that. I generally use AIM, but I also have an MSN Messenger account, since that's what my daughter's friends and "family" in Peru use, as well as our former exchange student who lives in Japan. I rarely think to log onto MSN, thus missing out on the chance to communicate with these folks. I decided it was worth creating an account and now I can see my AIM contacts and my MSN contacts all in one list. It seems to function similarly to the last version of AIM I used to use. Not bad. Oh, no -- a problem. Even though I have it set to do so, no noise is played when I receive a new message. I kept our Chilean exchange student waiting for a reply without even knowing he was messaging me. Well, nothing is perfect. *sigh*

I'm off to explore more of the sites on the list.

a little later...
Week 10, Thing 20: more Web 2.0 awards
Just a few notes on some of the other award-winning sites I explored:

One Sentence is a fun read, appropriately enough, since it was the second-place winner in the category "Fun Stuff." Fuzzmail could be mildly entertaining, but I can't imagine I'd really use it.

I played some games on Arcaplay and now I know where to find Space Invaders, in case I need to relive my formative years. **Note: this site has apparently changed since I originally wrote this post. So I took out the link and the game I had embedded. (Sigh. No more Space Invaders!)

Another game site, Guess the Google, was fast-paced and a little frustrating, but I had a hard time quitting -- "just have to try once more to beat this thing..." Try it!

It may have become apparent that I mostly tried out the "fun" sites, rather than the more productive ones. :-) I figure at least I'll know where to go and look for things when I need them. A useful skill, n'est-ce pas? For instance, the music site Pandora looks interesting, and I'll probably register there one of these days. It appears that I can use it to play music (that I actually like), which I might want to do when I am working late, without having to have something like iTunes downloaded onto my work computer. Some of the Search category winners let you create a customized search engine, which sounds intriguing. And after I do the podcasting stuff in the next week's "thing" I may find I'd like to explore the winners in that category. Plenty of time for all that!