is for VCarious, "a new way to explore travel destinations." You can read travel guides written by others, post your own photos and journals, and share interesting items with your friends and colleagues. This is based on a core Web 2.0 concept to get the users to create and contribute the content. Actually, this site is quite cool; it's definitely worth a look if you're planning a trip somewhere.

VCarious is a new kind of travel site for exploring destinations in the same way as first-hand travel. Using Web 2.0 technologies, VCarious provides a dynamic, interactive environment for exploring photos, journals, and travel guides. Members can interact with other travelers, share their photos and journals, and participate in creating community travel guides.

VCarious was created by travelers who were tired of canned, one-size-fits-all printed guides and frustrated with disorganized travel web sites filled with sponsored links. With its dynamic and interactive tools, VCarious enables travel enthusiasts to share their experiences and truly explore the world.

and Yes, I know I skipped "U".

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 2 (letters N-Z) were originally published in Information Today 24.10 (Nov 2007): p.15(2).

2.0 Alphabet

is for Squidoo. Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses --single pages that highlight one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Squidoo's goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo's goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo's goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.
Read more about Squidoo at The SquidLens.

Check out Squidoo's Library 2.0 Lens.

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 2 (letters N-Z) were originally published in Information Today 24.10 (Nov 2007): p.15(2).

No April Fools Joke?

There's really a book for Amazon.com!

Amazon.com for Dummies. by Friedman, Mara. Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, c2004. You can learn all about the personalization services and how Amazon recommends items for you based on your searching and shopping preferences - wouldnt it be cool if the Library catalog did that?


Of special interest:

-Chapter 3: You Are the Master of Your Account
-Chapter 11: It's All About You!
-Chapter 12: Putting Your Two Cents In


You could just visit Amazon.com and check out how their recommendations feature works.

1.0 Stuff About Online "Collaboration"

Here's a few recent - thought provoking - books that discuss about the mass participation in creating Internet content, ratings, reviews, etc.

Wisdom of Crowds (why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations) by James Surowiecki. New York, Doubleday: 2004.

"While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest)."[Amazon]

Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002.

"Mobile, wireless, Net-connected devices are now being hawked by the computer and telecom industries, prompting technology author Rheingold to take stock of the incipient revolution. Glimpsing the future in vignettes of wireless users in Helsinki and Tokyo, Rheingold primarily explores the sociology that might characterize a world of "ad-hocracy," in which people cluster temporarily around information of mutual interest. Rheingold describes how consumerism might change when pedestrians, as their mobiles detect stores and restaurants, patch into electronic gossip about an establishment. The location-detection feature of these devices will inevitably breach privacy, which informs Rheingold's somewhat skeptical stance toward this brave new world, and contrasts with the enthusiasm of certain computer scientists he interviews, such as Microsoft's promoter of a wireless urban space pervasively connected to the Internet. The cyber-savvy and socially aware will be interested and undoubtedly concerned by Rheingold's informed report. " [Booklist]

Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen. New York: Doubleday/Currency, c2007.

"Keen's relentless "polemic" is on target about how a sea of amateur content threatens to swamp the most vital information and how blogs often reinforce one's own views rather than expand horizons. But his jeremiad about the death of "our cultural standards and moral values" heads swiftly downhill. Keen became somewhat notorious for a 2006 Weekly Standard essay equating Web 2.0 with Marxism; like Karl Marx, he offers a convincing overall critique but runs into trouble with the details. Readers will nod in recognition at Keen's general arguments—sure, the Web is full of "user-generated nonsense"!—but many will frown at his specific examples, which pretty uniformly miss the point. It's simply not a given, as Keen assumes, that Britannica is superior to Wikipedia, or that record-store clerks offer sounder advice than online friends with similar musical tastes, or that YouTube contains only "one or two blogs or songs or videos with real value." And Keen's fears that genuine talent will go unnourished are overstated: writers penned novels before there were publishers and copyright law; bands recorded songs before they had major-label deals. In its last third, the book runs off the rails completely, blaming Web 2.0 for online poker, child pornography, identity theft and betraying "Judeo-Christian ethics." [Publisher's Weekly]

Instant Feedback & Ratings on Tech Help

Social networking meets technical support with FixYa, a social networking site dedicated to helping people with their computer and gadget problems. Recent solutions and problems, as well as a plug for the top experts, can be found on the homepage. You can search for both products and solutions or browse by manufacturer to find the help you need.


The site also lets you register and store all of your product warranty and support information in one place. Registering also gets you alerts when warranties are about to expire and direct manufacturer contact information, among other things. Nice!

There are thousands upon thousands of problems and solutions in this database - a great place to check when the library (or one of its customers) needs help with a technical problem. [From Librarian in Black]

FixYa lets users rate the effectiveness of the help provided so that you can use only those tech tips provided by the highly rated postings.

2.0 Alphabet

is for Last.fm, which "taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more." Listen online. Yes, it's very cool; CBS liked it so much that it bought the site last May.

Last.fm is a UK-based internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 21 million active users based in more than 200 countries.[1] On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m (US$280m).
Using a music recommendation system known as "Audioscrobbler," Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user's computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rightsholder has previously authorised it. Registration is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations. [Wikipedia]