#22. Explore Web 2.0 Award winners

I decided to focus on the winners that we hadn't already seen, starting from the top.

Findory: seems ok, but only really useful if you don't already have a home base that will allow you to add live content from other sources. My Yahoo! page let's me do this, so this isn't interesting to me.

http://ma.gnolia.com/ : another social bookmarking site that seems similar to del.icio.us but it doesn't appear to have the same integration with desktop browsing. Interestingly, I did a search for "library" and it came up with the "Curious Expeditions" site that was posted to libstaff recently, plus "Kids Click", "The Open Library", "Podiobooks" free serialized audiobooks (per our last Thing), and another "Library 2.0" site. That's pretty impressive.

Furl: another social bookmarking site, this one managed by LookSmart. Not as good in terms of content as the others I've seen. It does have desktop tools including a bookmarklet, as well as toolbars for IE and Firefox, and a Firefox extension.

Clipmarks: this looks really interesting and a bit different than anything else I've seen. It allows you to mark parts of pages that interest you. It has private and public marking and it appears to integrate with del.icio.us. I may be burning out on new things, because I'm not willing to join or load another service right now, but I will get back to it later.

Under "Books:"

Lulu : a self-publishing sales/sharing site; when they say books, they mean ink on paper. Hmmm? This won a Web 2.0 first place award. Seems like they are going the wrong way.

Biblo.com : a used-book meta search, but not a good one. (It found only one copy of Summer at Buckhorn for sale while AddAll found several.)

LibraryThing: the only real Web 2.0 tool in the pack and it comes in 3rd place. I think the Web 2.0 are so removed from the book world that they are easily wowed.

Reader2 : honorable mention reading list version of LibraryThing. It looks like a worthwhile social-networking site/tool.

I skipped the Business section ...

"City Guides & Reviews"

Yelp: is a local directory with review which provided mixed results. I searched "taco" in 95060 and retrieved 50 items. A sponsored link for Los Gatos Brewing Co. was at the top. It appears to rank by star ratings, with El Palomar first, then Tacos Moreno... oh, well.

Judy's Book : a bargain hunters' directory with local focus; searching 95060 got some local sources (Bocci's, Bruno's BBQ, and Star Bene) scattered amongst mostly online (non-local) sources.

Yahoo!Local came in 3rd and Google Local, Live.com, Menuism and Citysearch got honorable mentions.

Under "Classifieds" I looked at oodle which was, again, a mixed bag. It occurs to me that the key to any of these sites is content. That's why eBay was a winner, it got a lot of listings. That's why Amazon works, there is a lot of stuff there. That's why Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and iTunes are successes If you check a site and can't find what you want because there isn't much there, you'll go somewhere else. If you get there first and gather a lot of stuff, it often doesn't matter that someone comes along later with a better service. First=biggest=winner.

I'm burning out on this exercise and I think I've done what was expected.