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Mashups

This week I had an opportunity to explore Mashups & 3rd party sites. As defined by Wikipedia, a mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. The sites I examined all used Flickr images in their mashups. The first site I looked at was Mappr, which takes photos that have been uploaded into Flickr, and if they have been tagged with place names, sticks them on a map of the United States. Very handy, if a user is trying to locate photos from a certain region or area.
The next site I explored was Flickr Color Pickr. This mashup allows the user to select a specific color and then view groups of pictures in that particular hue.
Finally, I looked at FD Toys’ Trading Card Maker. This is a mashup that allows users to create their own customized trading cards using digital photographs.
Of the three mashup sites I explored, I would have to say that Mappr appeared to be the most useful, but the Trading Card Maker was the most entertaining.

Flickr & Tagging

This week I had an opportunity to continue exploring the site Flickr. As stated before, Flickr is a photo-sharing website that allows users to store digital images and organize them using tags. Although there are many photo-sharing sites, Flickr is by far one of the most popular and widely used. Flickr probably owes its’ immense success to their thriving Web 2.0 community. Other users can view your pictures and add comments, and contacts can be given permission to organize your photos. Also, users can create groups and these groups can host discussions. Besides offering opportunities for users to collaborate and network with one another, Flickr also offers a wide range of nifty features, like tagging. In addition to allowing searchers to find images on a certain topic or subject matter, Flickr also provides tag clouds, which give users access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Other features include, RSS feeds, geotagging, photo streaming, slideshows, and the list goes on.

Flickr

This week I had an opportunity to begin exploring the site Flickr. Flickr is a photo sharing website that allows users to store digital images and organize them using tags. I began my exploration by first taking a guided tour of the Flickr site and learning about the various tools it offers. After looking around a bit, I selected an image to blog about and post. The image I chose was a photo of a road sign for the small, Bavarian town of Neu-Ulm. I selected this particular image because back in the late 1970’s, my family lived there for three years, (my father was in the Army, and was stationed there). That sign brought back many memories of my life as an adolescent in Germany. After choosing a photograph, I saved the image to my U: drive, then went to my blog and uploaded the picture.

Web 2.0 Awards

This week I had an opportunity to learn more about the Web 2.0 Awards list. The Web 2.0 Awards were created by the company SEOmoz, who reviewed hundreds of sites and then rated and ranked them. Honors were awarded in 41 different categories.
As instructed by the Discovery Exercise, I selected a few of the sites on the list and explored them. The first site I chose was Healia. Healia is a consumer health search engine that allows the user to find high quality & personalized health information on the web. The next site I reviewed was Guess-the-Google, a fun game in which the player guesses which Google search term returned the images that are displayed. Finally, I tried the site Biblio.com. Biblio.com is a marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books.
Out of the three sites I explored, Healia & Biblio.com were probably the ones that would prove most useful in a library setting. However, I found Guess-the-Google to be the most entertaining.

Technorati

This week I had an opportunity to learn more about Technorati, which is a search tool and leading authority on blogs. Technorati currently indexes 112 million blogs and tracks over 250 million pieces of tagged material. I began my exploration by first watching a videocast tour of the site, which highlighted many of its’ new features. I then began performing various searches using the phrase Learning 2.0. Results differed depending on the type of search that I used. I received the most hits, (20,136) when I did a keyword search in Blog Posts. Using the Advanced Search feature, I then searched the same phase under Tags and under Blog Directory. There were 1,339 posts that used Learning 2.0 as a tag and only 933 blogs “about” that particular topic.
Finally, I took a look at the popular blog searches and tags. I guess what I found most interesting were the blogs from other countries, like Japan & Germany.

del.icio.us

This week I had an opportunity to explore the social bookmark manager del.icio.us and learn about tagging. I must say, this week’s lesson has been the most taxing one so far. Let me start by saying, I like the idea of bookmarking. The concept of creating a list of links that can be accessed from any computer is appealing. What wasn’t appealing were the Discovery Exercises, or more specifically, the del.icio.us tour. I tried viewing the recommended 8 minute del.icio.us tutorial, on various computers but could never get the file to open.
I finally gave up, and just played around on the site myself. I reviewed the Help screen and the FAQ’s, however it would have been nice to have the actual tutorial, for a better overview. I think overall, social bookmark managers, such as del.icio.us, have the potential to be great tools for research (especially, since they can be used to keep track of all the source materials and commentary that you find online). But they also offer great potential for fun.