Are people really reading this??

Some of our readers may also be writers.  If you have a web presence it can be useful to know how many people are visiting your site.  We have some examples of web tracking on our Blog here, but haven't really talked about the purpose or use of these trackers.  There are several kinds of trackers.

Hit Counters

Hit counters allow you to have numerical data about how many people have hit your site.  These are the simplest kinds of trackers.  We have a couple of examples on this page but specifically for this post I created one with the site: www.easycounter.com



HTML Counter

Maps

A more complex type shows you approximately where people are coming from.  These maps usually also have a visual representation of how many people are visiting the site.  www.clustrmaps.com and www.feedjit.com both have these maps available as code you can install on your own webpage.

Analysis

Finally, you can achieve higher level analysis of your web traffic with an analytics tool.  Feedjit has options that show you where a visitor arrived on the site from, and where they exited too.  Google Analytics one of the tools available with a Google account will also allow you to track how long people remained on the site before leaving.  So, go find out if people are really reading your stuff.

YouTube is growing up

YouTube is growing up and heading off to college.  Well sort of.  Youtube launched a new section of their service: http://www.youtube.com/edu is a collection of resources provided by colleges and universities.  This update in what and how content is delivered may give YouTube a greater legitimacy.  YouTube has long been seen as a source of silly videos, but it is quickly becoming more mainstream and providing more content that is not only ok but really very good and powerful.  Educators can use these resources with some increased confidence as YouTube continues to grow up.

LIVE! on the Web

In the earlier days of the web Hotmail was the hottest mail on the web.  It was one of the first web based email services available.  After a really long life (in web terms anyway actually only about 2 years) It was bought by Microsoft and has since morphed a few times and is now bundled with several other services that together are branded as WindowsLive.  These are tools that allow you to connect your desktop to the web in direct and straightforward ways.

The three main elements, that I think educators might find useful are:

Web based email!  Most educators have a school email client and often a web tool for accessing it as well.  Having a secondary method for getting email can be very useful.

Spaces! Spaces allows educators or anyone to create an online web profile.  This profile can have as much or as little as you choose.  Embedded within your space is your own personal web log or blog and a photo album

Skydrive!  Skydrive is an online storage space.  WindowsLive gives you access to 5 gigabytes of secure storage space.  it acts like a flash drive on the web.  And with the additional OfficeLive tool you can save directly from Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel to you online storage space.  Skydrive even allows you to share your files with friends that you choose or create shared spaces with one set of files instead of emailing things back and forth.

Another way to find the newest, latest, and greatest

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Looking for the latest and greatest Web 2.0 Sites, well, here is another great way to look for good stuff on the net.  Ziipa.  Ziipa creates an easily browsable and visual directory of Web 2.0 Tools.

WildEarth.TV

Getting live data is one of the fundamentally great things about the internet.  Now there is another way to get it.  WildEarth.TV has live video feeds of African biomes. It also has live chat alongside the video and a whole catalog of related information. The calendar s a subscribable public calendar for your Google calendar. This is definitely a good example of how some things are possible with the internet that weren't before it.




link to the site here http://www.wildearth.tv/home

Quotes Daddy

Quotes Daddy | Over 1,000,000 Famous Quotes

If you are a big bibliophile you may be like me and have thousands of quotes and snippets that you love from your favorite authors. Quotes Daddy allows you to not only search, and bookmark your favorite quotes but both include your favorites from books and add your own words of wisdom. A great Web 2.0 tool

You can also create a widget to include quotes on your blog or other website.

Quotes by QuotesDaddy.com

Web 2.0 What is it?

What is Web 2.0? I have been hearing this phrase kicked around for a few weeks but wasn't really sure what it meant. I am currently at a conference Sponsored by Classroom 2.0. We are discussing the definition of Web 2.0. It is very interesting that like many phrases we are defining it ourselves. We as participants in the system are creating the definitions by the way we use new tools and how we use the phrase. It is really appropriate that this definition is developing this way. The basic definition we have come up with is that Web 2.0 was a phrase coined by the industry to describe the web companies that survived the dot.com bust. One of the things that is key to the nature of Web 2.0 is the participatory nature of the web. Things like writing reviews in iTunes or on Amazon.com are examples of Web 2.0. There is also a philosophy shift from the web being a static resource for accessing information to being an interactive resource that participants add to the content as much as access it. There is also quite a bit of discussion about Web 2.0 being community and culture building.

So with that simple definition here is a link to my web 2.0 participation check out my Amazon.Com listmania list: Mitchell Jorgensen's Listmania Lists