Serendipity35

Here are 3 short takes on online services...

Want to know how popular a website is in the social web world? Socialmeter scans the major social websites and analyzes a webpage's social popularity. All you do is paste in the URL. Of course, I had to try it for this site. Disappointedly, we do fine on Technorati but come up dead for the rest of the social world. Geez, this is starting to feel like high school! Socialmeter checks Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web.

AOL has launched a new search tool to help students with their homework. StudyBuddy.com is available to all Web users but was built specifically for students in grades
K-12. It's free & accessible 24/7. It connects students to more than 1 million pieces of content, such as educator-approved (they say it was built with feedback & input from teachers and librarians) sites, books, journals, articles, newspapers, ncyclopedias, maps etc.

The tool also has "backpacks" - online folders where students can save searches and share saved items with others.

An interesting twist on the search engine is that it filters information based on their grade level.

Finally, there's Podbop. It's for finding live music in your town/area. Instead of looking up concerts in your town in the newspaper or searching online by clubs or bands, you can type in a city and get info on who is playing. It also offers MP3 samples for some bands.

This is one of those newer mashup social sites that will increase in usefulness as more cities, bands and venues are added. I use their RSS feed for my Bloglines account so it automatically lets me know if something new has been added in my part of New Jersey. Of course, not every town has content - as a sample you could look at Montclair, NJ - which, if you widen the search to 20 miles, will also include New York City. You can make the search radius 0-50 miles.

The format is a bit odd, especially in the RSS version. It took me a while to figure out why bands and gigs seemed to repeat, but it's working fine.