Web 2.0 Award Winners

I looked at several of the Web 2.0 Award sites and had a rather mixed reaction. Several were really commercial sites that were happy to sell you something (www.lulu.com; www.backpackit.com) although the product may be useful.

At least one of the award-winners was a "closed user site" (www.zango.com) where you couldn't get to see it. (Not sure how one becomes a member of that "closed user" circle). I guess the members of the award-giving committee were part of that special circle!

Many of the award-winners are known free sites that are very useful, such as YouTube, Twitter, GoogleMaps, Flickr, so they certainly deserve to be on the list.

A few sites showed the limitations of Web 2.0 in that they depend upon user input. For example, two sites that could be very useful because they are attempting to list events by place are www.upcoming.com and www.going.com. They only problem is that the local content is pretty limited and depends totally upon individuals entering the data. I would guess that if they become popular and well-known, then this type of website would become more useful.

The cooking websites were fun, especially with video demos (www.imcooked.com). It was great to see Christopher Walken roast a chicken, for example. Urbanspoon.com was interesting because it did include a lot of content about local restaurants. This page was well organized and easy to navigate. People can comment on their experiences and there is an expectation that copies of the menus can be uploaded.