And the Winner is…

I was surprised to learn that there were lots of awards for Web 2.0 features, and that there were so many different categories (I didn’t know what half of them did!). I ended up looking through the award winners, because the list of nominees was harder to wade through and had a lot of extra links to follow.

Here are a couple of the websites I explored. I looked at all the winning websites under the Books category (the natural place for a bookwyrm to look, right?). I wasn’t too impressed with www.lulu.com, since it was an online publishing company and wouldn’t be very helpful with reader advisory. I thought www.biblio.com was sort of like an Amazon, except limited to books and more for private use than library use.

I was most interested in www.librarything.com, because it is (supposedly) the largest book club in the world! Here you can find people with similar tastes and get recommendations on different books to read, and they aren’t necessarily only new books. You can also tag books and blog about books. Joining Library Thing only requires creating a user ID and password. The major drawback is that they charge for membership.L Sign up is free and you can have up to 200 books in your profile, but if you want to enter unlimited numbers of books it’s 10$ for a yearly membership or 25$ for a lifetime membership.

I looked at a couple of the online word processing websites. I was excited with this discovery, because they could be useful to the customers who need word processing but don’t have Microsoft Word. I was unimpressed with www.writeboard.com for several reasons. I didn’t find it very user friendly—Writeboard required html code to format the document. It is designed to allow for collaboration because all files require separate log-ins to access them and you can share the log-in with your collaborators. It is for people comfortable with the internet; less so for people who are only looking for a word processor to use.

I have signed up for a Google account, and I haven’t looked at all the features available to a user until I saw that Google had won first place in the Collaborative Writing and Word Processing category for http://docs.google.com. I guess it’s no surprise that Google has become the place to go for quick information searches and even for basic word processing and simple spreadsheets, too. The design was more similar to Word and easier to use. Google Docs also had a nice auto save feature that saves what you type every few minutes. Of course, you would have to create a Google account to access all these useful features.

There are many websites with incredible features and options, and we only need to discover what’s out there to take advantage of them.