Other Web 2.0 Tools and Final Thoughts

After looking through the list of winners of the Web 2.0 awards, I was surprised by how many of these tools I've actually used.  I especially like Picasa over other photo applications like Flickr, as the editing possibilities seem endless.  I used this program all the time during my time abroad to upload, edit, organize and share the thousands of pictures I was taking during my travels.  The winners of the music category surprised me as I've never used Lastfm before, but have used the other websites such as Pandora, until I discovered Spotify, which I mentioned in my first post.  Another tool that I was happy to see on this list of awards, was the second place bookmarking award for Stumbleupon.  I discovered this amazingly fun and entertaining website a few years back, but haven't used it in quite some time, so I decided to set up a new account and see what had changed.  While I could probably spend my life stumbling on this website, as it's set-up is geared completely to personal interests, and the content is limitless, I tried to remain slightly focused, as I noticed some differences from a few years ago.  I definitely understand why this won an award for bookmarking, as you are now able to search for topics of interest just like Delicious.  If I remember correctly, the overall set-up of the site use to be much simpler and didn't include a search bar as it just allowed for you to select from a much shorter list of interests and then simply stumble by hitting the stumble button, and also liking or disliking a page.  The website now has the fun aspect of randomly stumbling, combined with all the other aspects of a bookmarking site such as sharing with others, saving, sending messages, adding comments, and building a profile.  I love this Web 2.0 tool as it serves several purposes, but specifically enables people to simply discover something new.  Some tools I hadn't used before and explored were the retail tool, Etsy, and the book tool, Lulu.  I signed up and created accounts for both of these sites as I was interested in the publishing aspects of Lulu, and drawn to the uniqueness and all of the small creative businesses associated with Etsy.  Overall, I'm overwhelmed, but excited by the world of Web 2.0 and it's endless possibilities.  I really enjoyed exploring so many of the Web 2.0 tools included in the awards list, and realizing ways to utilize tools like Delicious and RSS into my profession in the future.