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Scratchpads are an easy to use, social networking application that enable communities of researchers to manage, share and publish taxonomic data online. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered free to any scientist that completes an online registration form. Scratchpad users include societies, journals, scientists, students and amateurs. Any group with an interest in natural history is eligible for a site and you do not have to have an academic affiliation, or any professional qualification. All you need is a little time, some information you would like to share, and a little experience using the web. You don't need to even be a member of a group, although the best sites are usually those developed by a community who make regular contributions.

With songr, you can find music others are listening to in real time. Being bored has never been more interesting.

MyStickies lets you save the web for later! Don't have time to read a full Web page and make notes? Add a sticky! Want to take notes about a particular Web page? MyStickes are like sticky notes for the Web. Once you've registered (free), you can add sticky notes wherever you like. When you come back to a page, the sticky will be there.

Google Voice is another Google product currently in preview. Google Voice might just revolutionize phone and voice mail. With google voice, you get a phone number that you could essentially use as your only phone number in the (near) future. Essentially, you can forward calls from the google voice number to any number you like and even change what number it is forwarded to based on the time. In other words, you can forward calls during the day to your work phone, in the afternoon to your cell phone, and in the evening to your home phone. You can even have the phone ring on all these numbers at all times if you like. Furthermore, you can set different numbers to ring to a different phone (i.e. friends always go to cell phone, work contacts always go to the work phone, etc.). As if that weren't enough...you can even set custom outgoing messages based on who (or what group) is calling. And there's more!!! Voicemails that come in are transcribed as text and can be delivered via email or sms.

Here are some good ideas about how to use blogs in the classroom. I look forward to expanding my use with students.

Diigo is the next generation of social bookmarking. In addition to simply bookmarking the page, you can include a snapshot (screenshot to include in the bookmark view),. You can also highlight information on the web page for inclusion in the bookmark (and also to be noted when someone visits the site from your diigo page. Another neat feature is that you can add sticky notes to the page. Again, these will be viewable by people visiting the page from your bookmark page. There are other features. I suggest visiting the page and taking the 'video tour' as you will love what diigo has to offer!

Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I have used this before and it is great. I posted it for a while as the "wordle of the day" on our web site.

Includes tutorials on various Web 2.0 tools. The Collaborative Projects listed are most informative. This site also provides examples of using Google Earth for collaborative biology projects, although it is applicable for other disciplines as well.