Serendipity35

A trend that I have never been a fan of on the Internet - sites that allow you to bad mouth others.

Most higher ed faculty know that there are sites for students to "rate" their teachers - http://www.ratemyprofessors.com and http://www.pickaprof.com are two sites where anonymous posters can say nice things and make constructive comments to benefit fellow students - OR - more likely, trash and post useless gripes.

There's a tepid counter blog site at rateyourstudents.blogspot.com which I find even more annoying.

Now there is also DontDateHimGirl.com which lets women post info on men who have been caught cheating on their wives and girlfriends or just generally treated them badly. The premise is that, like a bad professor, you can check the site's search engine and find out what to expect.

Women can post a man's name, address, photograph, and other personal information without his "permission" AND they can remain anonymous.

Is this legal? Julie Hilden asks that in her online piece where she suggests that "it's the evil twin of another site, GreatBoyfriends.com, where a woman can recommend her ex to other women. I'm guessing that DontDateHimGirl gets more hits.

Even on college campuses (the target audience) their are those pro and con on the site.

I suppose that students have been complaining about teachers since schooling began. And the ex-boyfriend bashing has been active even longer. Still, this globally public display is disturbing.

Wikibooks is a collection of free textbooks, manuals, and other texts that are written collaboratively online. Since the is a wiki, anyone can edit book modules without their contributions being subject to review before modifications are accepted. The project was opened in response to a request by Wikipedia's Karl Wick for a place to start building open-content textbooks. It was suggested that initial efforts might be directed towards titles such as organic chemistry and physics in order to reduce the costs and other limitations on learning materials.

Some books are original, others began as text copied over from other free-content textbooks found on the Internet. All of the site's content is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. Like Wikipedia, contributions remain the property of their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.

Wikijunior is the working title for a set of books targeted to children aged 8–11. This subproject of Wikibooks will be both a website and magazine. The website is currently in development in English, Japanese and Danish, but expected to be in at least a dozen languages.

Wikiversity is another offshoot of Wikibooks, though it ultimately may be to large to be considered a "subproject" of Wikibooks. It's an attempt to build a free, open learning environment and research community. People are building online courses as a form of co-operative and interactive exchange of knowledge. Wikiversity currently has portals in 17 different languages.

Another take on the recommendation engine website (like Pandora does for music).

You can just go to whatshouldyoureadnext.com and put in a book you like and the site will check their database of other readers' favorite books and suggest what you could read next. They compare it to "browsing the bookshelves of a very well read friend."

For the service to be more accurate, you should register (just an email address) and build your own list of favorite books.

I registered and entered a dozen, then asked for recommendations. I'd say that the results were pretty accurate to my taste because more than half of the recommendations were other books that I have read and enjoyed. (You can check THOSE titles off then and have them added to your list.) As your list grows, the recommendations get better - or more interesting.

So far, it really thinks I should read Fight Club.

They also have "What have I read tests" they compiled lists of users' most popular books (according to the number of lists they appear in) by genre (Top 25 science fiction/fantasy, classic fiction, modern classics, non-fiction etc.). Try those and it will build you list of favorites up and it's faster than typing in titles and authors. To save time on that process: if you want to add John Irving's The World According to Garp (and I would definitely have to add that one) you can just type Irving and World Garp and it will find it. The search is pretty good.

It's a cool service and it made me think about my favorite books again. So what's their business model? Books come with handy links to buying from Amazon (US or UK - it's a UK site), so if you click and buy, they make a little bit of money.

What have I read?
These are the 25 most popular modern-classic books at What Should I Read Next?

I liked it!

I didn't like it!

I want to read it!

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

Take the'What have I read?' test in 8 different categories, and if there's something you like, buy your books at Amazon US or Amazon UK

Google has a new Page Creator service. It lets you "design" and publish a web page. It's free, has no Google ads (yet) and will take you about 15 minutes to create.

Right now, Google is limiting pages to some of us that have Gmail accounts. (Word is that it will be opened up to others later, though I suspect you will still need to create a Google (mail) account. I applied for a page and was emailed an approval. I put up a little landing page for an existing website at poetsonline.googlepages.com

Some people seem to be upset with Google's offering. They don't like the coding behind the page and that your pages' address is based on your Gmail e-mail account name (ugh, spam possibilities)

OK, this is not for creating major websites, but for folks with no design skills, students who need a page quickly, anyone who needs free web hosting, and all those who would otherwise have NO web page, it seems a good idea.

What is Google planning? We don't know. Is it possibly just a good thing?

http://googlepages.com