How to Waste Time on the Internet Using Web 2.0 Tools

http://www.slate.com/id/2203733/

I ran into a funny article on Slate.com with suggestions about how to spend your time on the Internet now that the election is over. You can read the hilarious suggestions for yourself, but I've decided to take the list one step further:

Julie’s Top Picks for Wasting Time using Web 2.0 Tools!

10. Add flare to your Facebook page. A high school friend sent me some flare recently and I'm hooked. For those of you who don’t currently have ‘flare’ you can find funny buttons and put them on your own virtual corkboard, or even create your own for others to browse.

9. Search random people’s photos on Flickr – I use the Search function to find a place I like to visit (i.e. Paris) or funny and cute pictures (i.e. puppies). Once I’m on a cool person’s page, I’ll just look at their photos and try and figure out their life.

8. Visit www.podcastawards.com to view the latest and greatest award-winning podcasts. Download. Enjoy. My new favorite is Fly With Joe (http://www.flywithjoe.com/) which is a pilot telling funny flying stories. I’m a somewhat nervous flyer and Joe puts me right at ease.

7. Read archived Dear Prudence columns. I know that it's a trashy waste of useful brain space, and not exactly a Web 2.0 thing, but a guilty pleasure is a guilty pleasure. Here’s the link for those of you not addicted yet. http://www.slate.com/id/3531/landing/1

6. Become a member of an active online community. I just joined the community at Boots ‘n’ All, a travel site where people talk about their amazing travel plans. I’m pretty much just a lurker, but I am planning a weekend to Iceland in January, so I’ve actually been posting some questions. http://boards.bootsnall.com/eve/ubb.x

5. Listen to free music on Rhapsody. This site allows you to listen to 25 songs per month without signing up, logging in, anything. Even better, this site isn’t blocked by the firewall at my office, so this morning when I couldn't for the life of me remember the lyrics to an old Dispatch song, I was able to find it and listen to it, all while checking email!

4. Rate films on Netflix. I like to rate screen after screen of films, view my friends’ queues and rearrange mine. This can kill an hour easily.

3. Watch TV. When TV just won’t cut it, or my TiVo didn’t pick up a vital show, I’ll turn to the computer and watch my must-sees there. Bonus points for watching real TV while watching TV on the computer...it's a unique skill that I haven't quite mastered.

2. Google Search old flames, friends, co-workers. Enough said.

1. When all else fails, watch funny videos. I like www.kontraband.com for narrowing down the mass of videos to just the crucial, most hilarious picks. I’m also a pretty hardcore Terry Tate fan, and the Slate guy (above) suggested a series of videos called “You Suck at Photoshop” which I will be watching this evening.

I'm always looking for new and exciting ways to kill time on the Internet, so please pass over any suggestions you may have. I will be spending the holiday at my parents' place in the Midwest, so you can bet lots of time-wasting will be had!

Google's Black Hole

Geoff’s recent blog post (and our subsequent discussion) about Google’s new flu tracking capabilities struck a cord with me.

http://geoffreytorrance.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-flu.html

Never mind that I personally find the correlation between CDC data and certain Google searches interesting but not particularly useful. I find lots of things interesting and not particularly useful. But, Google seems to have this market cornered. If you take a journey to Google, you’ll notice all the other Google-related programs you can access: Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Groups, Books, Finance, Blogs, etc. In fact, Google has 42 other products you can access! Since 2001, Google has purchased 50+ companies, many of whom created their now-available programs, and many more of whom have yet to make it to the famed page of products.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

Some of these are well-known and heavily used, like Blogger, Google’s blog-creation tool. One of my personal favorites is Google Earth, which allows you to view satellite images of the house where you grew up or the hotel where you’re staying on an upcoming vacation. Other programs are completely unknown: Knol is a site featuring “authoritative articles about a specific topic.” Sounds like a weak attempt to copy Wikipedia, if you ask me. SketchUp allows you to create, modify and share 3D models. Huh?? Docs looks like Microsoft Word, but isn’t.

Google appears to be playing the buy-up-a-bunch-of-products-and-see-what-sticks game. A fun game, truly. It gives all of us something to talk about. But without promoting their products, most of those that even make it to the website go virtually unnoticed, which means they just linger around indefinitely until something else comes along. I am curious about Google’s motives, when they purchase these small companies only to let their capabilities and existing users languish in the depths of Google-dom. Isn't this a waste of time, energy and mostly, money? Are they hoarding all their purchases in a virtual vault somewhere creating the ultimate mashup of everything? A writer at Slate.com has had similar thoughts. He has dubbed the phenomenon the Google black hole.

http://www.slate.com/id/2197434/

A black hole, indeed.