Web 2.0 blog

No more posts here, move along please.

BookMooch is the Craigslist of swapping sites. It’s not as fancy as some other sites (such as LaLa and Peerflix), but it’s totally free to use. There’s no monthly charge and no per-transaction fee. You do have to give to get, though: each book costs a point. You get one point for sending a book to a user, and a tenth of a point for each book you add to your Moochable inventory.

Actually, there is a cost: you have to pay to send books to other users.

Since BookMooch uses points as currency, your trades do not have to be direct swaps with other users, as they do on the free trading site, SwapTree. On the other hand, on SwapTree you can trade more than just books.

BookMooch also has a browser bookmarklet, the MoochBar, that will find books on the Web page you’re on and add them to your want list or to your inventory. So if you’re on Amazon and see a book you want, you can easily Mooch it. You’ll have to wait for a BookMooch user to send it, but it will obviously cost you a lot less than buying it new.

BookMooch is run by John Buckman, who told me that when it comes to making money from the site, “I totally don’t care.” He made a lifetime of earnings selling his e-mail company, Lyris. Good for him. While there are too many swapping networks right now, the financial model of this one is in line with the negligible cash value of most used books.

Cyworld, a site based in South Korea, kicked off a beta in the U.S. on July 27 and later this month will formally begin a nationwide tour to encourage Americans, particularly those in the 18-29 demographic, to create personalized Web pages, or minihomes, on the site.

Henry Chon, CEO of Cyworld USA won’t say how many users the beta site has attracted but said the number is “way more than we expected.”

See Story on News.com

Should bloggers be afforded the same protections as “journalists?” What’s the difference between a blogger and journalist anyway? Josh Wolf, currently in prison for not cooperating with a grand jury over the release of video he took during a protest in San Francisco, says from behind bars, “I feel that people should be protected when engaging upon journalistic activities.”

Read the interview on News.com

There are some interesting online karaoke sites live right now: kSolo and SingShot in particular. Recently a more general-purpose online talent site went live: Bix. It’s a somewhat different beast, a talent-finding service that downplays the social network and instead has a laser focus on contests.

Unlike the other sites, you’re not barraged with a million different song links when you enter it. Instead, you’re directed to view entries in various contests, vote on them, and enter them yourself if you want.

What I like about Bix are two things: First, that the contests aren’t all karaoke based. There are dance, photography, and even writing contests. And second, users can easily create their own contests. American Idol-like talent show producers could obviously use a tool like this (American Idol is more likely to use kSolo). But this tool might also be used for job recruiting. For example, see the GigaOm blog writing contest.

If you just want to goof around and record some karaoke for your pals, stick with kSolo or SingShot. But if you’re all about the competition, check out Bix.

CNET’s Tom Merritt has a quick tutorial on installing WordPress on your own server. Can it really be done in five minutes?

Video: Install a WordPress blog

Anybody who’s ever taught a course knows that there’s a lot of data that has to flow between teachers and students to make it a good experience. There are schedules and materials to distribute, papers to collect, and grades to track. College professors have teaching assistants, but how this was managed by grade-school educators before the Web is a mystery. Maybe there were gnomes.

There’s a free Web tool call e-Office Hours that can help out the tired teacher. The system is, essentially, a specialized Web site publishing tool. Users can create sites for each course they teach. A site can have a calendar, a file repository, a discussion forum, and simple access control system. There’s also a FAQ authoring tool and, for students, a system that attempts to match natural-language questions from students with FAQ entries. It’s hit-and-miss, but students can just read the FAQs.

Students can not only pick up files left on courses’ web sites, but place assignments into a dropbox for their teachers. Unfortunately, the system is lacking a grade tracking function. That’s planned for an upcoming release.

E-Office Hours is not a fancy system. It’s not a zoomy distance education product with a real-time whiteboard broadcasting and a live polling engine. But it’s free and it’s simple, and it’s easier to set up a Web site for a course with a tool like this than it would be to apply a general-purpose Web publishing tool to the job.

AOL’s recent privacy gaffe that exposed user search histories may breathe new life into a proposal to slap strict rules on what data Internet companies may collect.

Story on News.com