VBPL 2.0 -- Tagging... and the Web 2.0 awards

Happy New Year!!

I started writing this post almost three weeks ago, and then took a little much-needed, stay-at-home vacation... but I'm back (and I read some wonderful books that I can't wait to tell you about, so expect some new reviews in the next couple of days).

For Week 8, we had three discovery exercises for Learning 2.0 -- the first two, about tagging and folksonomy and Technorati (click the link to see my Technorati profile) which are all fun and possibly useful, and a little bit scary to us library types, and the second, which was much more fun, playing with some of the sites from the Web 2.0 Awards. I discovered a few fun sites I had never played with before, like One Sentence and Guess-the-Google, but was also happy to see a lot of the tools that I already use on a regular basis, so I wanted to highlight a few of those here:

Google Docs -- See that picture on the left? That's this very post being written in Google Docs. I've also used their Spreadsheets (wonderful for collaboration*), and Presentations. But I also use it for almost everything now: making shopping lists, planning out storytime themes, and, of course, writing papers. And while it doesn't have as many formatting options as Microsoft Word, there are also easy options for downloading your documents in different formats (including MS Word, Open Office, and PDF), and for e-mailing them.

Pandora -- Type in any artist or song title you like, and pandora will start playing similar artists. You can then customize this newly created radio station by giving each new song a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down." (Also, if you happen, like me, to be stuck behind a strict work network, try Finetune -- the interface isn't quite as pretty, and you have to put a bit more work into creating your playlist -- but it works)

Etsy -- A happy colorful site for buying and selling homemade crafts, Etsy is a great place for finding one-of-a-kind gifts ... and inspiration.

Kayak -- Basically, a search engine for airfare -- searches all of the major travel sites (expedia, orbitz, travelocity) and all of the airlines (and has lots of options for flexible dates or nearby airports)

See... Web 2.0 can be fun and useful! ;)

*and might, perhaps, work better than excel for our huge Learning 2.0 spreadsheet