Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Thing 20 - other web 2.0 tools

Some of the winners are sites we've already explored through L2.0. Of the others, some are sites I'm already familiar with or using. Like Craigslist. I LOVE Craigslist. I have sold things, bought things, and found babysitters using this site. Free classifieds, who wouldn't love it? Google Maps, awesome. I use it at least once a week. Meebo has been talked about a lot in the library blogosphere, as a great tool for chat reference. I have some friends who use Twitter, but it doesn't really appeal to me. There are a couple of sites that I think will be helpful for me with web development that I plan to go back and revisit.

BUT: for this exercise, I think I'll jump on the bandwagon and try out Pandora. I feel pretty out of touch with music. I haven't bought any new cds in ages, and the only MP3s I've bought/downloaded have been songs or bands I already know. I've been wanting to connect with some new music, so I think this would be a great tool for me to use.

So, my evaluation after a little bit of use: I like how it tells you why it selected a particular band or song, so you can see what criteria it's using. I only listened to a few songs, but I agreed with all the ones selected, based on my initial input. The whole music genome project sounds really cool. What a fun job that would be, eh? Sitting and listening to songs and determining their attributes, who sounds like who, etc. And if you find something you really like, just follow the link to hear more samples from the album, plus links to buy it. Yeah, I definitely see myself using this site.

Now, if someone would come up with a book genome, we'd have the ultimate reader's advisory tool, right?