My Favorite Web 2.0 Tools -- Session 3 -- Part Two

So, Web 2.0 is a term for the movement of applications from the personal computer onto the web.  Many of the applications that people use today are available for free in a web based format.

I chose for my personal productivity tool to look at Delicious.com.  This is a Yahoo product that keeps your bookmarks online so that, instead of bookmarking websites on your personal browser you bookmark them on Delicious.  You can then log into your delicious account from any computer and have access to your bookmarks.  In addition, this tool is designed for you to share your bookmark lists with your friends.  It refers to itself as a social bookmark site.  I'm horrible at remembering URL's and this is the ideal solution for me.  I have already signed up for an account.  This can increase my productivity because I can do research from any computer and, without an email, mark the pages that I found for later use.  It can increase my students productivity if they all have accounts they can do research and share resources with each other simply by bookmarking pages.

I chose Tokbox as my screen recorder selection because I thought it looked pretty neat.  It has a free video conferencing feature where up to 20 people can join, talk, text chat, and share videos and photos all at the same time.  You can also use it to send a free video message of up to 10 minutes.  I can use this to collaborate remotely with colleagues or I could even video conference in a sick student from home to class.  Any reason that a group of people might have to work together on the phone, any sort of meeting, could be done using this tool. 

So, that's my take on Web 2.0 at this point.  On an tangential point, a good science fiction book that starts with a near future look at the impact of cloud computing is Accelerando by Charles Stross.  I can see the near future that he envisions being upon us in the next 10-20 years.  The end of the book gets well out into hard sci-fi, so if you're not a fan it's probably not for you.

Until later!