What I Learned Today…

Web 2.0 and programming tips from a library technology enthusiast, What I Learned Today… covers blogs, rss, wikis and more as they relate to libraries.

Monthly Archives: July 2008

My del.icio.us bookmarks for 2008-07-03

July 4th, 2008

More of my links

Yelp Makes it to the Big Time

July 3rd, 2008

But when can you truly say that a company has “made it?”

It’s when people start hating you, of course.

Sites like Yelp-Sucks and IHateYelp have been popping up, with the general theme being an angry business owner who was Yelped. Those business owners that think they must use Yelp for competitive reasons are getting frustrated over some of Yelp’s policies, and are starting to complain about it. Loudly.

The good news for Yelp is that when businesses are afraid of you, it’s only because they realize how much power you really have. See, for example, Paypal and Ebay, two of the most reviled and profitable businesses on the Internet.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said recently in the NY Times, “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.” Their goal is clearly to make businesses need Yelp, but not to expect a lot of help when it comes to disputes. Complain all you want, you’re just proving that you need Yelp more than they need you.

This from TechCrunch.

I’ve been a member of Yelp since soon after my wedding when I had a big complaint to post about my photographer! I then sort of forgot about the site until I started working for LibLime. I am traveling so much that Yelping has become a hobby for me. I review every place I go while traveling and have been going back to review places I have been in the past. Unlike the implications above, I actually have mostly positive reviews on my account with only a few below 3 stars.

This is a great tool and over my vacation I invited something like 50 people to join Yelp and share their reviews. Now I’m inviting all of you! Join in the fun!

Technorati Tags:

My del.icio.us bookmarks for 2008-06-20 to 2008-06-30

July 1st, 2008
  • Cocoalicious
    Cocoalicious is a del.icio.us client for Mac OS X. It acts as a desktop interface to your del.icio.us bookmarks Cocoalicious is open source, available under the terms of the BSD License.
  • When is Good
    An easy way to find out when everyone is free for your next meeting or event.
  • Abbreviations and acronyms dictionary
    Find out what any acronym, abbreviation, or initialism stands for
  • twitabit: post your tweets here when twitter is down
    A simple way to communicate that stays up when Twitter is down
  • Google Map Maker
    A wiki-like Google Map tool.
  • TinyPaste
  • NUS Library Online Public Access Catalogue
    Rapi is an open-source project of the WING group in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore licensed under the MIT license. Rapi provides an OPAC package
  • Accredited Degrees » Features Library & Research » 100 Awesome Youtube Vids for Librarians
    These days, public librarians and academic librarians are on the cutting edge, dedicated to bringing their resources and their patrons into the 21st century with technology.
  • Hippopost
    Hippopost? is an exciting new web-2-mail marketing application that transforms B2B direct mail into meaningful C2C correspondence.
  • pic resize
    Crop and Resize photos, images, or pictures online for FREE!
  • Poll Authority: The Authority on Free Online Polls And Video Polls
    Need a poll for your website or blog and don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on a custom solution? Then you’ve come to the right place!
  • Tablefy: Publish Your Data:
    Create comparison tables
  • TripIt | Organize your travel
    TripIt is a free personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans.
  • 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You?ve Never Heard Of
    This list features a huge variety of search engines that can be useful to students, including tools that find photos, sound effects, summer internships, health and medical information, reference guides, and a lot more.
  • FictionDB
    Author Bibliographies and Series
  • Open IT Online
    Open IT Online is a Firefox extension that allows to open and edit your documents from everywhere!
  • Yapta!
    Let Yapta help you find the best flights, track prices, and alert you when prices drop so you can secure the best deals on airfare.
  • iPresentee – Keynote Objects
    iPresentee presents free Keynote Objects for Apple?s Keynote, iWeb and Pages! The package combines 100 easy to use and attractive objects. The background of all objects is transparent and can be used on any colored background.
  • Open Web Design – Download Free Web Design Templates
    Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!
  • centrif
    When you search on centrif, you’re searching other users’ questions. If you had the same question they did, you’ll discover the answer they found useful.
  • LibGig | Your Career, Your Community
    LibGig is a new professional networking website dedicated to bringing together everyone who accesses, organizes, creates, manages, produces or distributes information for a living.
  • Smultron
    Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 which is both easy to use and powerful.
  • Toluu
    Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.
  • HelloTxt
    Send out status updates to several social networks at once.
  • Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds
    Wordle is a toy for generating ?word clouds? from text that you provide.

More of my links