Mark Frydenberg

I learned today that Google Lookup is going away at the end of the month. Google Squared is gone too. Both are related to the phasing out of Google Labs applications.  I wrote about both of these technologies in Chapter 6 of my Web 2.0 Concepts and Applications book as great examples of APIs and the Semantic Web.

My favorite demo to do with GoogleLookup was to enter the name of a US President in cell B2 of a Google Spreadsheet, press the CTRL key and drag it down a bunch of rows… using Google Sets  to generate the names of several other famous Americans (Ben Franklin makes the list, and he was never a president.) Then the formula =GoogleLookup(B2, “place of birth”) entered in cell A2 returned the birth places of

each.   This sets up the values to easily plot on a map.

More screenshots after the jump.

continue reading…

Check out the latest list of Web 2.0 collaboration tools in this month’s Campus Technology magazine.  I was one of the “self-confessed web 2.0 junkies” interviewed for the article. The others were:

Matt Brinton

Matt Brinton is the interim assistant director of student activities at Metropolitan State College of Denver, as well as the NASPA Region IV-W technology knowledge community representative.

Kimberly LaPrairie
Kimberly LaPrairie is the coordinator of the Master of Education in Instructional Technology program at Sam Houston State University (TX), and an assistant professor in curriculum and instruction. She uses numerous web 2.0 tools in her courses, most of which are completely online.

Alexandra Pickett
Alexandra Pickett is the associate director of the award-winning SUNY Learning Network, the asynchronous learning network for the State University of New York. She also teaches Introduction to Online Teaching in the online CDIT master’s program at the University at Albany (NY).

This year’s batch of collaboration tools includes amplify, audioboo, dropbox, eventbrite,  factual, glogster, join.me, jumpscan, pbworks, quora, voki, and zamzar.  How many do you use in your class?

Similar to Facebook Connect, Twitter has launched @anywhere, a new service that allows users to tweet about activity on other sites from anywhere on the Web.

“We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.”

The textbook is published.  I finally saw it in print last week at the Course Technology Conference in Tampa.  This week it’s featured in the Campus Technology Magazine’s Web 2.0 Newsletter.