Wednesday, September 24, 2008

I looked at the "Food" section. They were mostly video clips of people cooking particular recipes. I suppose if you chose a particularly tricky recipe, this would be very useful, but the ones I watched could have been very easily made just by following written instructions, so if I'd wanted to make them I would probably just have Googled "apple sauce brownies" or "salt roast chicken" and got he recipe that way - quicker than waiting for someone to do it in front of you. I'm afraid I can't see an application for this in a library setting. But one of them might be, I suppose, if it worked properly. It was called urbanspoon, and it said it was going to tell you where restaurants could be found near any address in the chosen city. Apart from the States, you only had the choice of London or two in Australia, so I tried "Paddington Station" - and it said sorry, it couldn't find it! So I tried a street near there (Norfolk Sq, Paddington), and it said it couldn't find that either, but did I mean Norfolk Sq, W2? I clicked that, but it said it was still lost, but then on another part of the page I saw that it was already offering me some choices. They didn't have menus, but you could tell from the reviews what sort of restaurants they were, so I suppose if you had a patron who wanted information on restaurants in a city, you could use that. But they probably wouldn't ask a librarian, they'd ask a travel agent.I also looked at the education one, but that looked a bit boring, and then a health one, but that was too exciting. Well, there were so many things you could look at and find out about - if you were particularly interested in some disease, I expect you could find out a lot.

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