Web 2.0 Awards

I found three sites that really caught my interest.

I played Guess-the-Google, and that is one cool game. The game chooses a keyword and presents you with a montage of 20 pictures it finds on GoogleImages with that keyword (one would assume the top 20 hits). You then have to guess the keyword in 20 seconds or less. Very good for the organizing instincts - kind of a variation on the "how many ways can you think of to organize this pile of objects" game. My only complaint is that they don't tell you the answers for the one you missed. (I emailed Grant Robinson, the creator, about this.) It is thus not the perfect training tool.

I also liked Boxxet, which is a mixed media (videos, photos, blogs, news, etc.) RSS aggregator that finds "the best of" and "what's hot" information for various topics. However, instead of you choosing the feeds, you choose the pre-formed Boxxet about the topic you're interested in. Boxxet chooses the feeds. I looked at the Boxxets for books and Doctor Who, and it really is about what's currently being talked about. Books was all about J.K. Rowling/Harry Potter (of course), Terry Pratchett (Alzheimers, so sad :( ), Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series (LAist recommends), and Tolkien/Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson is filming "The Hobbit"). Doctor Who was all about the Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned" with a few tidbits of news and gossip about the upcoming season. So not so good on breadth, but good on currency and depth and variation of media. Also, you can tell them what you think they should have Boxxets on. I suggested libraries/librarians. We'll see how responsive they are.

Coverpop (a webpage of Jim Bumgardner a.k.a. KrazyDad) is mostly a way of displaying current information or grouped information through mosaics of images. For instance, he has "1,001 Science Fiction Books" which is the covers of 1,001 science fiction books tiled into a mosaic. Each cover is a link to it's page on Amazon.com. Or, he has "YouTube: Today's Picks" which is "today's 101 top rated videos from YouTube, updated daily," which works the same as the science fiction books mosaic - each still is a link to the video at YouTube. He has also created the Whitney Music Box which the website describes as "a musical realization of the motion graphics of john whitney as described in his book "digital harmony"." This is a site you can spend a lot of time on, and really brush up on your pop culture, among other things. Jim Bumgardner's Blog is also really fun; he create puzzles and new mosaics and shares them.