Hello Cleveland!

Today's adventure involved creating a Meez avatar. There were so many things to choose from!! Inspired by my Guitar Hero experience, I decided to try this out as my first image. In my childhood I dreamed of being a rock star. Now I can virtually.

Seeing my avatar rocking out I immediately think of Spinal Tap. There were so many great scenes in that movie. I really wanted to get Stonehenge as the background for this, but alas it's not a free one. So I've settled for what looks like a bad 80's hair band music video look instead.

ROCK ON OCLS 2.0'ers!!!!

Much web 2.0 to share

It's week 4 for the OCLS Learn 2.0 course and there was a lot of interesting sites to look at. So here's a little bit about some of the stuff I looked at:

• Ask a Ninja was fun to watch, I had never heard of it before. I've now subscribed to the podcast through iTunes so I can catch future episodes.
• I knew about OCLS having videos on YouTube, but what was really interesting was seeing that a member of the public posted a clip of the library float from one of the Citrus Bowl parades. A true example of web 2.0!
• Adventure task - I went to ToEat and have submitted Z-Coffee, we'll see if it shows up. Good concept, but do we really need that many entries for Arby's? I also noticed places listed that are no longer open. Overall it's a good example of a mashup and a site I'll probably use when going on trips to other cities.

I was already familiar with a number of the winners for the SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards. Here are a few of the new discoveries I made:

• One Sentence - This site asks people to share in one sentence a life story. It allows you to tag and rate each sentence. Interesting to see how creative people can be with just one sentence. Some are very personal and powerful.
• Guess the Google - This game gives you a montage of images and you try to guess the common keyword. While many may only see this as a fun time waster, it can get you to think about what images are attached to keywords and why. One frustrating feature is that it doesn't give you the correct keyword if you miss it - you just get the first letter!
• Swivel - Looking for graphs? They have lots of graphs and charts at this site. People are able to post graphs on anything (warning: and I mean anything). You can get some ideas on how to visually represent your data by looking at what others have done. Take a look at the Feature Graphs for some interesting submissions.
• ColorBlender - Not sure what color to use with your favorite lavender? Go to this site and get an entire pallette with just a few clicks! You can download your created blend of colors for Photoshop and Illustrator, it gives you the HTML code, and the RGB numbers. Awesome!

My final share element is StumbleUpon. I've used this a couple of times and could spend hours just wandering around the web seeing what others have "stumbled upon". For you search engine fans, give it a try and see what interesting sites you find.

Now if I can just stumble upon a great and simple idea that Google will pay me millions for...

Search engines and future gifts

I just looked at some of the latest items from the Innovation Lab centered in Denmark and thought I'd highlight just a few things. One of the older articles is called, "The Quest for Smarter Search Engines." This ties in well with our week 3 activity in the OCLS Learn 2.0 course when we took a look at Grokker. Two search engines that they highlight are Mooter and Blinkx.

First Mooter - A search engine from an Australian company that offers initial results as a series of clusters. I did a search for dolphins and it offered me three different cluster options, all offering spokes going to the mammal and the football team. Their quest is to create a search engine that can create more individualized results based on an algorithm that actually learn over time what a particular user is really after.

Blinkx is a video search engine. Unlike the conventional search engines that look at only file names and metadata, Blinkx actually watches the video clips to bring more precise results. I did a search for just the word "library" - see the resulting list here. Another feature of blinkx is the "Wall it!" option. It will create a wall of video preview boxes for you. What really caught my eye was that two different CBS affiliates showed the exact same video about today's libraries but with different titles - "Pubic libraries need to change with the times" and "Libraries forced to get modern day makeover." Interesting.

My final entry is just for fun. Innovations Lab has a list of the top ten Christmas gifts for 2016. I'm definitely putting a few on my list!