Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I saw that last.fm won first place in the Music category of the SEOmoz's awards. I was a fervent user of last.fm for a while and discovered some great music that way. But the site kept losing my data somehow. I forget the details of what exactly went wrong by now, but I do remember that it was so annoying that I deleted my whole account. One other funny thing was that artists and others can manipulate the site to mess with what you see depending on how you enter a name. I entered "Winehouse, Amy," for instance, and on that page it said something like: "There ain't NOBODY called WINEHOUSE, AMY, so update your ?*&#$! files!!!" (I know that I shouldn't have been, probably, but I was a bit put off by that.) At least that taught me that you couldn't rely on how many other users listened to an artist because some entered the names inverted (like this cataloger did) and some put them in directly, and that changed how the site worked. I went so far as to put all the names in both ways--a bit much, I admit it ...

Another site that I have used some is Lulu.com. The very large Dictionary of Invertebrate Zoology was getting so many hits on the UNL Dig Comm Web site that the authors were asked if they would like the full book-length version of the dictionary to be made available via Lulu and the authors agreed. From the Dig Comm site: "The Dictionary is now available for purchase in an 8.5 x 11" hardcover edition, 381 pages, for a price of $90.00. Copies may be ordered at http://www.lulu.com/content/2080614." I don't know yet how well the book is selling, but it's been fun to help with publishing a scholarly work this way.

I hate to say it, but I was glad to see that LibraryThing did not win an outright award in the books category. Though I use their site very often, and to record thousands of books, I see huge flaws with what they're doing, as I have talked about in earlier posts. This exercise has led me to Vufind, and I will be curious to look into what that is all about. I like the look of it, but there's a lot to absorb about it. It could be really good, depending on how you can import data. I see that some major libraries are trying it out, and a few are even live with it. This looks promising so far.