I live in Web 2.0 and Never Knew It!

I am by nature a cheap skate. I love free stuff.

I've had my Google account for at least 3 years now, and have used many apps. My personal calendar texts my phone with each entry so I never "accidentally" miss appointments or events anymore. At school, we keep all events on multiple Google calendars, including the schedule to our most popular "multipurpose" room which is used by several different groups all the time. Embedding Google calendars into your web pages is remarkably easy. Click here to see our results. This fall I set up a Blogger blog for each of our classroom teachers to use as parent newsletters in an effort to keep parents better informed, as well as save precious resources. Five of us are blogging notes primarily to our parents several times each week, but what a great way for students' grandparents or other family members to stay involved! Here's my sample. We feed our blog summaries directly to our web site as well as our PowerSchool Daily Announcement site. Picasa is my all time favorite web app. I use it to organize my digital pix which now number somewhere near 13,500. I've been using it since April, and when they rolled out Picasa 3 a few weeks ago, I was just ecstatic! Red eye...no problem. Click one button, and Picasa is usually intelligent enough to find the eyes and correct the problem! Now it even recognizes faces! I add an email address to a face, and I can share pix with that person with one or two clicks. I have three Picasa accounts so I can post lots of pix publicly or privately for personal or school use. Take a look at some of my school pix here. Google's Webmaster Tools are a great help to me in determining what Google's webcrawlers see when they crawl my sites. These tools also provide me with diagnostic information about my sites so I can update my metatags, directing people to my sites when they search.

Two other Google apps I find quite useful are Google Gadgets and the Google AJAX Feed API. These are not part of the Google Suite, but are well worth the time to explore if you design web sites.

I've been using both Pandora and Slacker at different times throughout today. I'm not liking Slacker. I set some stations and was playing it in the background as I was working, and all at once heard an ad for TurboTax. Slacker is out. I know that these Web 2.0 sites need revenue from somewhere, but I don't tolerate ads very well. Pandora sounds much more promising right now, but I'm going to need to listen for a couple more days before I can be sure.

That reminds me, someone in class asked about how these 2.0 sites operate. "There's no free lunch" was the expression. I think I hit on the way it works. From what I've learned at http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/andy-grove-on-web-20-and-the-valley-slackers, many of the Web 2.0 "corporations" develop a site, try to get lots of traffic, and then market themselves to the big boys like Google in hopes of selling their apps for a huge bundle. It seems that some consider this tactic short sighted, even unAmerican. I get somewhat soured as I learn more. See for yourself. It just proves that there really is no free lunch.