Sunday, September 21, 2008

#17 - exploring the interweb awards

i love it! this exercise was heaps of fun. i love looking at the "best of" things. Google took home quite a few as to be expected. Google is taking over the internet O_o anyone else freaked out about that? i suppose that's another blog entirely :P

I looked at a few sites:
- Cocktail Builder - you just enter the ingredients you have and it tells you what cocktails you can make
- Groowy - this looks cool, an online desktop but groowy "are no longer accepting new accounts." and that is why i was unable to check that out which was pretty disappointing
- Twitter - i joined this which is apparently more useful than facebook...but I don't know anyone on it
- mango - you can learn languages with this american voice guy. quite interesting but it is much better to have an actual teacher, i think face to face is a much easier way of learning
- Pandora - which is also now unavailable to users outside of the US due to copyright restrictions

The website that I checked out to write about though was Last.fm. This site is interesting because it connects to your media player like iTunes and gets information about what type of music you listen to and then can adapt your experience with their website. i love it how the web becomes so personalised these days. Like when amazon recommends you read certain books because of what you browsed earlier. It's great. I liked that you don't have to download the plugin in order to be able to enjoy the site and that it is free unless you would like to upgrade unlike the other finalists in the music category. It is also fun for the social aspect and meeting people with the same music tastes as you. I think it would be possible to utilise a similar type of tool in the library in the way that we log the books that people read and the rating they give to these books. We would be able to recommend books that they might also enjoy and other people who enjoy a similar taste in books. It would be useful to have forums for discussion of genres, books, authors etc and a direct link for patrons to reserve a copy of the book.

This sounds exciting to me and I can't wait for it to be implemented by our system however this may take quite some time.

1 comment:

NSL Training Support Team said...

Wow. With those last remarks you caught the essence of web 2.0 and it is wonderful that you connected those attributes to how we can apply them to our library services. Way to go!