Week 5, #11 Hall of Fame

Exploring the Web 2.0 Hall of Fame was, in simple words, fun. There were many sites that were relevant to my personal interests as well as to my professional interests.

Because I've been learning genealogical research, I started with My Heritage. I wanted to compare it to the databases I have learned. Although it would take days to explore this site to its farthest reaches, I can already see that it focuses on sites that are not likely to be found in the large pay-for-use database Ancestry.com. Most of the info is either more current than Ancestry.com (such as phone directories)or a bit off the beaten path (local basketball results from a Jamaican newspaper. But a search engine is not a social network site. I wondered what made this Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 aspect is the ability to contact each other and share data. Family trees can be public or private. In this way, My Heritage is similar to the free Family Trees portion of Ancestry.com. The first six member trees were private --not so social :) -- although you can email to be allowed to view the site. Sometimes you end at a pay site, such as in the obituaries. The message board gave me no hits. The free message board at ancestry.com provides 20+ hits. The social networking aspect seemed to include younger people, more hipsters than Ancestry. Overall, it's a site worth exploring but not up to the quality of the leader Ancestry. Still, as a free site, you could use it with oral history projects, immigration projects, etc.

I love the SEOmoz short list version of the award winners. That should be posted for students and distributed to faculty. Here are some of the other programs I tried from the short list: Twitter (can't feel the enthusiasm other people do; my Twitter circle must be too small & I don't have phone internet); Craig's List (giving newspapers a run for the $$; good for apt hunting if you want to avoid the agencies); Google Docs (many school applications, esp. for group projects); Wikispaces (I've been using that for a while actually); Yahoo Answers (makes Wikipedia look scholarly); Del.i.cio.us (I want to try this more when I have time; great for those who move from lab to lab; may get obsolete if one-to-one laptop program gets prevalent; do I really want everyone to know my bookmarks); YouTube (another old fav; I get tons of great tutorials here for kids/staff); Google Maps and Yahoo maps are pretty standard stuff now.

Next to explore: LibraryThing (I've tried it but need more time) and GoodReads.

Of everything on the chart, I think Craig's List, YouTube and Google Docs are the most well known. Kids are addicted to YouTube. It connects them with their culture, but could be seen as so much more if students were pushed into using it for serious endeavors. I think Google Docs is the application we should teach, but often don't. The wiki programs are the ones most often used at my school.