This week's challenge was to select any site from the list of Web 2.o Awards nominees, explore it and then blog about it. Sounds simple, but with 147 sites to choose from picking just one took a bit of deciding.
I was already familiar with many sites - VuFind, Facebook, flickr, del.icio.us, Bloglines - so I didn't bother with those. Others looked interesting, like Biblio.com (look for out of print books), Cocktail Builder (what cocktails can you make with the bar ingredients you have) and urbanspoon (look for restaurants in your area) but were a bit limited once I went into them and looked around. Still others I liked a lot, but were costing me money - thanks Threadless!
I finally settled on Galaxiki, a virtual galaxy with over a million stars, along with their planets, moons and other orbital objects. What I really liked about it is that the galaxy is created along scientific lines, and there were discussions around such things as what is the maximum percentage of oxygen you can have in the atmosphere before it is spontaneously ignited by lightning (apparently this depends on the gravity of each planet and the resulting atmospheric pressure, for those who are interested). Yes, I confess, I'm a bit of a science nerd.
Solar systems can be claimed and edited by community members, who can then name their system, create lifeforms, and describe their history. Members can participate as much, or as little, as they like. You can edit a system and leave it at that. Others create complex histories for their systems, and write stories based around them which they can post on a community blog. I kept things very simple and claimed a solar system for 23 things.
The star is, of course, named Eleanor, around whom we all rotate :) You can find out which planet is named after you, along with a description of it and how many moons you have, by clicking on the image. Celine's planet is named after her username. Apparently there's already a celestial body called Celine out there somewhere :)
Would this application be useful in libraries? Hmmmm. I think not, really. But another application on the list - .dotstock - would be. It's a really interesting site which lists over 3 million public documents and could potentially be very useful. It just wasn't quite as much fun.