Emily Explores the Web 2.0 Awards Site

While looking at the list of Web 2.0 Award Winners I couldn't help but notice how many different awards they had and how many of those sites I had never heard of. I was shocked! I've have always considered myself somewhat up-to-date on the internet, but apparently not. Anyway, I do agree with most of the awards and sites I recognized, but mostly I was just glad that MySpace did not win in the "Social Networking" category. I will admit that the list was a bit daunting because of the sheer number of categories and it is not too easy to find one to look at when there are so many. All in all, not a super useful lesson because I am still not exactly sure what I am supposed to be looking for in the list of winners. It appears to be yet another website I could potentially waste time on.

Emily Explores Google Labs

Google constantly amazes me, but I was somewhat disappointed with the Google Labs. I am definitely a fan of Google Maps and so I expected to enjoy Google Mars but it was a huge let down. They only got one very small satellite image and decided to repeat it several times and it wasn't even a very interesting image at that. The only redeeming feature of Google Mars is that the elevation view is so colorful and therefore amusing for a few minutes. The Google experimental searches with the time line is pretty cool as well as Google Suggest and Google Trends. Overall, it was semi-entertaining and semi-useful, but not much more than that.

Emily Explains Online Application Tools

Lame is my summation of this week's lesson. Why would I type something in Google Docs and then post it to my blog when I can just type it in my blog, which is less hassle. I can see the potential usefulness if I manage to find some computer out there in the world which by some miracle doesn't have Word loaded on it. I also can see the validity of the argument that a Google Docs document is saved in my Google account and therefore on any computer with internet access, but now that I have a nifty flash drive from Library 2.0 to carry around it doesn't make that much difference to me where my documents are saved.

Reading about Web 2.0, Library 2.0, & the Future has only confirmed an idea that is floating around there. Technology is good and change is good. But we already knew that. However, that was pretty much all I got from these articles. They were sort of difficult to understand and filled with references to many things about which I have no clue. What is WorldCat? I'm hoping it is some sort of giant cat which is plotting to take over the world. I am not a fan of this lesson and as such am now going to abandon it.

Emily Explains Search Engines

This exercise was not very helpful for me, except that it confirmed what I already know. Google is the only search engine for me, I don't know why, I just have some sort of special bond with it. That said I did try Mooter, Clusty, and Exalead. Mooter got an instant "No" because it was a cluster. When I am doing a search I do not want a cluster to whittle down my search I want all of the billions of sites I should get. Clusty is just okay. It is hard to read for some reason, don't ask me why. Now, Exalead is a search engine I could potentially use. It has small pictures off to the side of the results which makes me infinitely happy, but that means you have a very limited amount of results on each page. In conclusion, I will consider using Exalead in the future, but Google is still King in my book.

Emily Explains RSS Feeds

I have heard many of my co-workers complain about the RSS Feeds lesson being really difficult, but I didn't find it too challenging. When I set up my Google Reader account it helpfully asked if I would like to add "bundles" of feeds, which were packages of about 6 different sites that I could add all at once. Thank you again Google, you always know exactly what I want(where would we be without Google? If they decided to take over the world I probably wouldn't be too upset. Who wouldn't want to live in Googlandia? Or Googlemerica? Or The United States of Google?). So once I whittled down the list of feeds, taking out a few I didn't really want, it didn't seem too hard. I was able to get the 10 feeds required for the lesson and add a few I found on my own in about 20 minutes from start to finish. The only thing I don't like about feeds is from some sites you never really know what you're going to get from it. For example, YouTube. I thought it sounded like a fun feed to have, seeing as YouTube is sometimes amusing, but all I got in my feeds were some videos that I can only assume were Polish. Not too helpful. But, even more unhelpful were the so called "search tools" Topix, Syndic8, and Technorati(or as I affectionately call it Techno-lame-i). After having had a day to consider RSS Feeds I have decided that I don't really care about them. I don't look at so many websites that it is all that useful for me and the "search engines" are terrible. So...thumbs down!