I have been heard about Rollyo, but never looked at it until day. By the way, I did try the Travel IQ in the previous week, the best I could do was 32 miles from New Orleans, other than that- well let’s just say that I would lose in Trivial Pursuit.

Back to Rollyo,I created a search engine all about Photoshop. I signed up to attend Photoshop world this fall. It will be my first time at a Photoshop conference and I am really looking forward to it.

I created a category under computers and added in websites that I go to frequently. I clicked on create an account. Then a new page comes up with many categories in the center. My Photoshop  was included as well as many others, it took me a few minutes to find out why parenting was part of my default category as I did not create it. I found the main listing to the left and and changed the categories to suite my interest.  I did add Rollyo  to my favorites and will check it out and add more to my listings. After you created your own search engine, you type in keywords, very similar to google and your listings will show on the right and you can select the link and go to the website that meets your interest.

Earlier we vistied Flicker and we played with our images, now we look to other sites and how we can manipulate them further. I viewed the site of web 2.0 winning applications http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/short and have decided to look at lulu.com. Its a site where you can build your own books. Perfect for the independent, or self publisher. I have heard of it before, but never visited it until today.

At lulu, you can create your own comic books, books of any interest. I like the cookbook section. Our family have always talked about gathering all of our mother’s best recipes and put them all in one single cookbook. After she passed away, the first thing that my siblings wanted to share among ourselves was her recipes. At first I thought that was really funny. Of all things in the house, the biggest question was “Who was going to get mom’s mexican cookbook?” it turns out there was a few arguments of who got what. ” I will take the Mexican cookbook, and you can have the Christmas Cookies one”.  With lulu, we could have saved a few heated words between siblings. Mom would always mark the recipe with a star or a note if everyone loved it, so it would be easy to pull which ones we all liked into one compilation.

Even a family album would be a great gift idea.  The prices ranged from $10.00 and up, depending on the binding, paper type and other choices.

I like the layout and the friendly nature of the site, and it has a great directory of various books that are already available for purchase.

For a classroom setting, I can see lulu as a valuable tool, if the educator wants to publish there own book on a subject or a study guide, lulu looks like a good tool as they have various layouts and all you have to do is provide the content.