Web 2.0 awards explorations

I chose to look at a site from the category of "City Guides and Reviews". I am already familiar with Yelp.com, so I decided to look at Judy's Book, http://www.judysbook.com. This site provides users with access to information about sales both online and from local retailers. To get local retail information, users enter their city and state or their zip code.

I entered the terms "Frederick, MD", and got 7,905 results. Under the "Types" feature, you can sort your deals by type, and I sorted mine by "in-store deals". What I didn't realize when I first went to the site was that most of the deals were from major (or at least bigger) chain retailers. I thought maybe there would be some information about actual local, non-chain retailers, who maybe do not have a web presence. You can also filter the results by store, and by tag. I found the tags sorting feature to be more useful than sorting by store, because stores like Target have a lot of different departments and a variety of products, unlike stores like The Camera Shop. By looking at the tags, I could see which deals were related specifically to things like "back to school" stuff.

I was a little disappointed that a lot of the deals were really for online shopping. I thought that the advertised "local" component was even a little more misleading because of this. I still would (and plan to) use this site though. I especially like how this site has a listing of store deals, as WELL as coupon codes. Some of the coupon sites I go to have not been very useful, but this site seems to be very legitimate and I think that coupon codes from here would be current too.

I think this particular resource may not be as useful for libraries as would a review site, such as Yelp. On the listing of Web 2.0 awards, I feel that Judy's Book may have been more aptly placed under the category "Shopping" as opposed to "City Guides & Reviews".