#40 Retroland

What do you remember about the clothes you wore 10 years ago? - 20 years ago? - What you were watching on TV or at the movies? This site has all this and more. Retroland covers from the 1900's to the 1990's - looking at food, fashion, tv shows, movies, music, places, school days, toys and arcade games - American style.

Actually the contents of this site are a good illustraion of how American products, consumerism and lifestyle have been imported to countries around the world. A lot of the brand names and products I had heard of even if they have never been available in Australia.

It was still fun to browse through the various categories - I found quite a few old TV series I could remember watching - and quite a few more that I can remember as utter junk.

#39 Animoto

I first had a play around with Animoto back in 2007 when I was just starting looking at Web 2.0 applications. I was quite impressed with it then, and it is still a great fun application to use.

When I first used it I just used images from their collection. This time I decided to upload my own images. I first tried connecting to Photobucket, but that had a few problems, so I went to Flickr, and selected the Lord of Rings set of photos I had - which actually were images from Photobucket that I had imported to Scrapblog, made into a scrapbook, and then exported to Flickr - now I'm using the same set to make a video.



I think I really need to take more photos so that I can upload them and then I'll have plenty of stuff to play around with.

#38 Comic Relief

Creating your own comic is great fun, and using ToonDoo, surprisingly easy. It actually reminded me a bit of Scrapblog, where, after you have selected a background, you just drag all the different elements that you want onto your working area. You can also upload photos or pictures from the web or from your own PC.

#37 Radio Stations online

Of the two options listed here, one (Pandora) was not available outside of the USA (due to licensing restrictions)- which left LastFM to explore. LastFM was very interesting. Once you have joined up, you can list some of your favourite artists and LastFM will then recommend other artists similar to those you have listed. You can leave a comment about tracks you like (or "shout" about it as LastFM calls it), and see what other people have thought about them.

There are biographies of the different artists and you can see where they are appearing if they are on tour. As well as free access you can also subscribe to LastFM which allows you to great playlists and other more advanced options.

As well as finding some of my favourite artists, I picked up a few different ones, particularly in the Celtic area. At times I found the tracks were a bit stop and start as they were playing, but it wasn't too bad. Below is a selection of the music I was listening to.

#36 Online Photo Editing

With all the different photo sharing sites around, it only makes sense that someone would come up with online photo editing applications. I've checked out a couple of the featured ones in Learning 2.1 - Picnik and Splashup (which used to be Fauxto).

I was really impressed with Splashup, which is clearly aimed at a serious, professional level. The interface is clean and clear - you don't have to search through ads and gimicks to find what you want. Click on the "Jump right in" link and a new Window pops up. You can import your photos from your PC or from site like Flickr, Facebook and Photobucket. The tools you can use are familiar from other photo editing software such as Photoshop - maybe why I like it because the general operating environment is familiar.

Splashup also has "Splashup Light" a downloadable application which gives you a basic range or editing tools plus a range of easy to use fun tools. I used it to edit this photo - cropped it, resized it, altered the colour a little and then used 'Emboss' to make it look just a bit different. All done quickly and easily by clicking on the various icons.



Picnik also allowed you to access your photos from other social networking sites. Once you had uploaded your photo you could manipulate things such as colour, size, and exposure, or you could crop the photo and correct red-eye. Picnik also offered three options called "Create" - where you could add text and embellishements to your photos, "Collage" - group photos together, and "Fancy Collage" - create scrapbooks, cards etc. These all looked interesting, but when I tried them I couldn't get anything to open. I just kept on getting stuck on the loading icon.

#35 Mini Blogging

Twitter and Jaiku are what is know as mini-blogs. They allow you to send short messages (around 140 characters only in some cases), basically along the lines of what you are doing this instant. They developed out of mobile phone messages. You can follow specific people to see what they are doing or commenting on, and you can link through to your blog or other social networking sites.

I just cannot see the point in these - they would have to be one of the biggest time wasters around!

#34 Good Health Online

Today I have been having a look at online dieting sites - Fitday and Nutridiary. The basic idea behind both sites is that you can keep a track of what foods you eat and what activity you do, and the site will then calculate the amount of calories you have eaten and burned off. Obviously the more information you enter the better the feedback you get will be.

I tried entering what I had eaten for a day and then activity for the day. At times I found it a bit slow, possibly because I was having to look for all the different items I wanted to enter. In the end thought it was interesting to go and look at the overview and see how calories consumed matched up with calories burned, and what the average percentages of fat and protein etc were like.