Week 8 Things 18 & 19

Thing #18
After exploring Zolo Writer, I decided to create a desperately needed spreadsheet to help with budgeting for an upcoming vacation. The speadsheet was easy to create however, I couldn't find a calculator feature to total my expenses. Fortunately my brain was up to the task! This site had very cool options, I was able to "share" my spreadsheet simply by typing my husband's email in the designated box. He will be able to read and edit the spreadsheet via his email. When editing occurs I will be notified of the changes. The other very helpful feature is that you can change the format of the document so that it can be viewed in various programs. Have you ever had a an email document you couldn't open? Not fun, I tell you! Anyways, I will definitely make use of this web-processing tool:).

Thing #19
I chose to select from the "short list" of winners of the Web 2.0 awards. Ranking #1 for City Guides and Reviews is "Yelp" a wonderful tool that the Library system could definitely implement. Yelp is very user friendly, all you need to type in is a keyword and city/state or zipcode. The search is very generic so it doesn't matter how much of the name you know, for example to find local seafood cuisine, you could just type in "crabs" and 20646. A list of neighboring seafood restaurants will pop up with phone numbers and maps etc. Patrons can look up community businesses and services including restaurants, automotive, hotels and even religious organizations. In addition, reviews can be accessed and added for each business. I think this would be a valuable addition to our community database covering the tri-county area and more!