Showing posts with label widget. Show all posts
Showing posts with label widget. Show all posts

Thursday, 21 January 2010

More new widgets

I'm having fun with widgets today and have created another one for optional use in guides:

wordnik word of the day (large)
wordnik word of the day (small)

This comes from Ward's latest Top Choices:
Reference \ Humanities
Wordnik.
http://www.wordnik.com/
Wordnik is great fun. It combines the speed of the Web with the ease of print. Simply by clicking on links at the top of the screen, users may look up the definitions of any word, along with examples, pronunciations, etymologies, related items, and statistics. For instance, Wordnik estimates that someone is likely to use the word "ant" about twice a month (viewing the numerous flickr photos found under the main entry could lead to even more use). A bubble chart illustrates the word's use in the past two centuries. Additionally, this reviewer clocked the 90th look-up of "ant" on Wordnik. That's neat. But, like many Web sources, this site is only as good as its contributors. Fortunately, they are very good indeed. Anyone may log in and add words, sounds, pictures, tags, and synonyms; in the spirit of camaraderie, these contributions tend to be sound, valid, credible, and cool. What Wordnik will not do is provide help for misspellings like "commaderie." A useful addition would be one of the ubiquitous "do you mean" features for those who are challenged by multi-letter concoctions. Users can stay in touch with Wordnik through Twitter, a blog, FAQs, and "recently looked up," "random word," and "word of the day" features. Students stuck in a boring lecture could open another browser window and check out Wordnik. They may not be up-to-date for class, but they would have a lot of fun learning new words. Wordnik qualifies as marvelous, stupendous, and colossal. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general audience. -- K. Condic, Oakland University