Week 5, Thing #11 Exploring Web 2.0

I went to the Web 2.0 Awards list to look at some award-winning sites. There were enough there to keep me fascinated. I tried to limit myself to just a few but will come back and explore even more as time allows.

Medstory, a health site, was very comprehensive and allowed you to drill into specific sites having to do with the health topic you were looking for. You could keep refining your search. Right off the bat, if you typed in a condition, you were given drugs used to treat it, procedures, clinical trials, articles from news media as well as research articles, people involved in research, etc. I wished that in the research articles, my keywords would have been highlighted in order to find them easily. I think students researching health topics would find excellent sources here.

I tried out Kayak for awhile, looking for some cheap flights and I thought that the site was easy to use. I liked being able to zoom in on flight times, layover duration and trip duration. I thought it was good being able to see all the comparison of prices of other sites. It seemed very user-friendly. In the end, the flights weren't cheap enough for what I was planning to do, but that's not kayak's fault. One annoyance was that every time I went back to try another set of dates, it would wipe out my destination airport. The application here is purely a personal one, not for a library setting.

I also tried out Guess-the-Google and found it to be a very clever and addictive game. It moves very quickly. It's a little frustrating because, if you don't guess the answer, they don't give it to you. They only give you the starting letter It's fun to see the top scores of day and you can enter your's, if you want. It might be stretching it, but it would be a fun way for students to practicing keyword identification and making connections.

I went to Ning and looked at the various social networks. Some just have a couple of people, some haven't really gotten off the ground. I searched on some topics that I could be interested in and found some groups but at this time, I just don't have the time to join one of them. However, it is good to know how to track them down.

I played the Traveler IQ Challenge and thought it was fun and let you practice your geography skills. This would be great for the students in my school since they are very into the National Geography Bee each year. As a part of this exercise, I practiced adding this widget to my blog. They say you can add it to your website if you copy their html code, which I did. The problem is that their text color is pale yellow and doesn't show up well. Their widget conditions say you can't alter their test. Any ideas on how to fix this? I also don't know how to change the color in their html code.

IQ Traveler Challenge is brought to you by TravelPod, the Web's Original Travel Blog ( part of the TripAdvisor Media Network )