Week 5: Thing ELEVEN

I sampled a pretty good number of award-winning Web 2.0 sites. By no means was I able to tackle them all, and some sites I was already familiar with, but I checked out at least one site from over half of the categories. Of all the sites I looked at, there was only one that I really felt compelled to comment about. Listed under the category "Fun Stuff" by SEOmoz was a website called "One Sentence". According to the site itself, "One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials." Every word of this description is true. What I found to be misleading, at first at least, is the category under which One Sentence earned its Honorable Mention award. I read post after post on the first page, each of them successively becoming more soberingly morose.

"Of all the things I thought I would be doing on my birthday, begging my cat to just let go and die peacefully in her sleep so I wouldn't have to take her to the vet to be put down was not one of them."

"Normal has been tilted and is now my new normal ever since my husband committed suicide."

Upon further reading, the mood did lighten a bit from the string of macabre posts and , on average, became more "fun". If you're not in the mood to fish through an emotional roller coaster of posts, all of the real gems have thankfully been consolidated into one spot on the site, under the popular link.

"My cat challenged me to a game of 'Guess Where I Pooped Before You Step In It' and I lost."

*****

I became a part of a Ning that was created to facilitate communication between a small group of Alaskan educators statewide who attended the CryoConn 2009 workshop this past January. The purpose of the Ning is to erase the geographical distance between all of us, and foster not only communication, but also to allow us to share educational materials.

*****

"Sorry guys, I didn't get a chance to grade your lab reports because all of my freetime nowadays is spent playing the Travel IQ game". I'm hooked -- not to the point where it is interfering with my job, but definitely to the extent that it taunts me when I try to divert my attention from it. I think the game is wildly entertaining. I will say, though, that the degree of difficulty makes an incredible leap from levels 9 & 10 to levels 11 & 12. The last two levels are near impossible -- I mean, who knew that Christmas Island, Australia is nowhere near the continent to which it belongs, and is instead an island neighboring Jakarta, Indonesia? In any event, I'm pretty proud of the fact that I actually made it to the last level, so I took a screen shot of my score and posted it below. The bar has been set......