Cool Web 2.0 Sites

I found some cool web 2.0 sites on ehub today:

Interaction lets you chat with the visitors of your web site instantly. With 3 versions, you can use it for fun or for your business needs.

With blipstar, small business owners can easily add interactive store locator maps to their websites with this Google Maps mashup.

With Mountain Reviews, skiiers can browse mountains by difficulty, find resorts that match their abilities, & discover the best ski areas in their region.

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As of today, Google is letting you download out-of-copyright books via Google Book Search! Similar to projects like Project Gutenberg, Google Book Search public domain books are cataloged, searchable, and now, downloadable. This could save school kids some money - now they don’t have to buy the complete works of Shakepeare, they can just read it online or download it and take it with them on their USB drive.

Microsoft catches up by opening up their latest Windows Live offering: Windows Live QnA. Now a staple of the net, Question and Answer sites aren’t that revolutionary, but Microsoft ups the ante a bit by categorizing topics via tags as opposed to traditional categories, like those Yahoo! Answers uses. It’s not a bad site, easy-to-navigate and well-designed. My only complaint is the font color used - couldn’t that be darkened up a bit? It was a little too light for my preference…made my eyes hurt.

I just received 5 more Vox invites to dole out. Any takers? First five to comment here score.

…is very, very cool! With drag-and-drop ease, you can "geotag" your flickr pics, by dragging photos onto a Yahoo map which updates the location info associated with the photo. Also, you can set permissions on who can see this info (the whole world, your family, friends & family, etc.) — smart move. Hmm…I really should take more photos.

The new Google Webmaster Central is a site where you can get information about how Google crawls and indexes websites: "You can learn here how to ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed and access tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in our index, and tell us how you’d like your site to be crawled and indexed."

Let’s check it out…my site is indexed by Google, but they think I should use a Sitemap. I could also upload a verification file in order to get more detailed results. I guess I should work on this, huh? It also says my site was last crawled by Google on August 26th. Pretty good little collection of tools; when I get some more time, I’ll be back to play some more.

Google has just announced the release of "Google Apps for your Domain." The communication and collaboration tools include Gmail, GoogleTalk, Calender, and GooglePages. With an administrative control panel you can customize these with your branding, color scheme and content, without having to buy expensive server hardware that has to be maintained. These services are completely free (as they should be), but the end-user agreement hints that there may be a premium version in the future that Google would charge for.

This may work for the small, small business, but a larger company will need support and uptime guarantees. One thing I don’t understand is why they wouldn’t list their spreadsheet and word processor online apps here. Aren’t they as business-y as IM?

In other Google news, some big deal with Ebay and Skype is happening now…but that’s nowhere near as exciting as business-branded Gmail is it?

Microsoft offered to help Mozilla in porting Firefox to Windows Vista, and Mozilla accepted the offer. Apparently, the director of Microsoft’s open source lab (they have a what?) posted a letter to a Google Group as well as having emailed Mozilla with the offer to provide one-on-one assistance. Mozilla gladly accepted the offer. Wow! That was really nice of Microsoft. What is going on?

I was testing out the new Windows Live Search today, specifically, the video search, and so far, I like what I see. Although Yahoo! & Google may currently have more results in their video search, Live Search will likely catch up once they get out of beta. The video search results were uncluttered, designed to be easy on the eyes, and surprisingly, ad-free. Clicking a small arrow to the right of a search result expands the video result with AJAX-y ease, allowing you to read more of the video’s description, while also revealing the video’s details like file format, resolution, genre, etc. I guess I need to update my "video on the web" list.

LibriVox is a site that offers free audiobooks from the public domain. Volunteers record chapters of the books and publish them to the site. Their goal is to record all of the public domain books and make them available for download.