Week 4 - Wow!

There was a lot to experience in this week's lesson - very interesting stuff!

I loved the Web 2.0 video - I watched it twice, and will want to see it again.

The article (yes, it is long) on the YouTube guys was very interesting. I've seen some clips from that (usually sent to me in e-mails) and was pleased to note that participants police the site, so that there shouldn't be any pornographic material. I will have to check out the Lazy Sunday one referenced in the article. I recently viewed a video of "talking dogs" (eerily good) sent in an e-mail from a relative. I'm pretty sure that clip came from YouTube. I was surprised to see the OCLS videos on YouTube, and watched a portion of Art Fest.

The sites I visited on SEOmoz were two book sites: Library Thing and Lulu and one music site, Pandora. I enjoyed listening to some Streisand vocals (no one is better!) while looking at the Pandora site.

Library Thing allows you to create a "library quality" catalog of your books (they pull the ISBN and other descriptive information from Amazon) as well as a place to share thoughts on books. One of their tabs was labelled "zeitgeist" which I had to look up (using dictionary.com). Zeitgeist refers to the spirit of the time, age or era; a general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time. Information sharing and online collaboration is the zeitgeist of our decade.

The Lulu site is for self-publishing, and I was surprised to see several top sellers that are works of research - one in particular was entitled Unleashing Capitalism: Why Prosperity Stops at the West Virginia Border. Growing up in a state contiguous to West Virginia, I know that portions of it were crushingly poor; evidently not much has changed. I expected to find more of a vanity press selection; this was a pleasant surprise.

I have to wonder, though, how much online sharing really brings people together - those who are comfortable with the technology will embrace it; but will those of a different generation or income level be even further alienated?

It's something to consider, don't you think?