Web 2.0 Awards

I thought I should finally get back to finishing the 23 things, better late than never!

I had a look at the web 2.0 Awards list and as I am moving soon I thought I would check out the Real Estate winners. The first prize for the Real Estate awards went to Zillow.com. I thought at first that it was similar to Realestate.com.au an Australian site which allows you to search for properties either to rent or buy. I use this site a lot it has great search options it allows you to save searches and receive emails when a new property matching your search terms is placed on the site. Although there are similarities this site has some great features which realestate.com.au does not have. It allows you to compare on a graph the price of the property to the area and also lets you see if there has been any increases or decreases in value. The graph showed that there had been a dramatic drop in the price of the property and properties in the area in 2008 (this is a US website) For this property it showed a list which showed the real estate agent had dropped the current sale price of the house and the prices the house previously sold for in 2001 and 1996. There was also a map of the surrounding area showing estimates of the house prices. These features would be an excellent addition to the Australian website which only allows you to see a sample of prices of properties which have sold in the same area. I am guessing that the real estate agents would probably not be so keen to see these additions. This website makes it easier for buyers to research local prices and to see the past prices and how values in the local area have changed allowing them to become more informed.

I do not think that this specific site would have any value in a library setting. However it may be possible to incorporate aspects from the site into a Library setting for example the use of graphs to compare values. In a search results list it would be handy to have a graph which shows how many times each item has been cited.

Online Applications and Tools

Well goodness it has been a while since my last post and I feel very guilty. For this week we were meant to take a look at some online productivity tools. I signed up for Zoho Writer what seems like an eternity ago. It is an online word processor which allows you to share your documents with your friends. At first I thought what is the point of this I have Microsoft Office why do I need Zoho. But after checking out their website and trying it out I can see how it would be very useful. It is a great way to share documents without having to constantly email and get confused about different versions of documents. I also thought this would be great for people who have an Apple Mac computer at home and use microsoft at work. This way you can simply save your document online and access it from the different computers. I found Zoho Writer to be very similar to Microsoft Office word it has very similar features and is easy to use. Zoho also has many other applications such as Zoho sheet which is a spreadsheet application and Zoho Show which is a presentation tool. It came 2nd in the Web 2.0 awards in the organization category with high scores for usability and usefulness.