Casting the Pods

DO now that I have done a bit of the Pod Casting I have decided that sadly enough itunes has control of this market. The other sites don't offer nearly as many podcasts as itunes, but What is nice about the others is that you don't have to sign up for it. However, your looking for one particular podcast there is a better chance of finding it on itunes. I had a tough time finding a library related podcast that I thought would be interesting. Many are related to specific libraries no where near me, so what would be the point? I did find one called LibVibe, which contains all the library related news of the week to one site. I this would be pretty interesting. I did find other podcast feeds related to books and have added those to my bloglines. I think podcasts are an awesome way of catching up on shows from the radio you've missed or different news items that are out there. I just haven't used it that much, but totally see the point and its a good one.

Audio/Visual

So I tried all three of the different social networking music sites. I think I probably liked the feel of Pandora the most, but I'm not enticed enough to want to join up. I would rather use a service like songza which keeps a list of music for you to play without having to make a social connection. I guess I'm not that social and I would prefer not to be. As far as the other sites go I am a big fan of Project Gutenberg. I have used this many times before with looking at ebooks, but didn't realize that they had added music to their site as well. I thoust it was awesome that they had free mp3 books available for download. I feel that this service could be something we could easily include with our own electronic resources. Multnoma County has been using free MP3 downloads of book on their website for a while now and really wish we would! I still like listening to cds and tapes in the car or at home, but that convenience of the mp3 player cant be beat. I really like to use all music mediums available to me. I still buy and listen to records for cryin out loud, so if it plays music I'll use it. I still would rather buy my music in a hard copy and then download it to my mp3. I think CDS will continue to exist as records have managed to exist, but it will take time for the young generation to learn to appreciate the concept of waiting a bit for things and that you cant always have everything right now and something new every two seconds.

Google Docs

So I get the whole Google Docs thing. Its just that I don't actually need to use it. I don't email people that often and I don't need to keep people up to date with what I'm doing. I think it could be a great platform for those in the business world who do lots of interoffice emailing among co colleagues. I could totally have used this all more in college when working on group projects and we were trying to organize group projects. Making slide presentations and combining them all together as we go along without having to meet at some hour at school would have been helpful. Now it seems really not usefull to me, but good to know about.

FUN STUFF

Well this was fun! I wandereed around quite a few of the sites that had been listed. I had my blog rated and now know it is for teens and older and placed my rating on my blog. I next moved on to the sketchcast where I played around with that for a bit. I have never been good at drawing with a mouse and wish I had the pen pad I could use, but non the less I drew up a little something and posted the video on my blog. Next I played a bit of the typing game. Boy i wished I had this beck when I was in typing class, it was way more fun than any of the other timed games they made us do back in school. I could really see this being used to help people with their typing speed and memorization of the keyboard. Finaly I started up a email game of Scrabble with my mom. Should be fun! I can definatly see the usefullness of Yahoo question and answer, escpecially when you have trained people answering questions now and again.

Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki...Wiki

I happen to really like the concept of Wikis. I use Wikipedia all the time, and not just for library use, but for my personal interests. I use wikipedia when looking for info on authors or illustrators and just want to know their bibliography. From there they offer links to other sites with more info or to their own website. When I was looking at the different Wikis I thought one of the coolest was the Wikihow site. It has just about every kind of to it yourself info or hobby info. The greatest thing about wikis is the obvious, which is the ability to share information and knowledge readily for everyone to use. I think this is great as a book collector when info about specific book editions aren't always available in print. I often find useful info on these wiki pages from people who are quite knowledgeable collectors. For a library I feel this still holds true. If a library offers a wiki connection to their website it allows library patrons to become more involved with the library and the community. Patrons could share info about ongoing events in the community and as well as those being offered in the library, just as possible examples.

Good Readin! Darn Tootin!

I found that out of the two I really like the simplicity and smoothness of goodreads compared to librarything. I've used Librarything before and always found it too cumbersome, but a great idea, I didn't know about Goodreads until now and like it much better! However I wish there were easier ways of uploading your own books and pictures so that I could record what books specifically by edition I have already collected. However, Goodreads sure beats paying the high prices of software that lets you do just that. I wish you could narrow your search more by specific edition, or publisher, and also have the ability to upload pictures of books that currently don't have images, when you could find one on the web or scan one in! But all and all very cool and I think I have a bit more to explore with it.

Technorati

I'm sorry but this one really didn't do anything for me. Technorati's page is set up really badly, its not convenient or easy to use. Its kind of a pain trying to link to the stories that are on there and I found that there are other search tools like Google news if you wanted to find new stories in every field and genre. When I did the advance search looking for blogs and tags for learning 2.0 I couldn't see anything different with either way of searching. It seemed to pull up the same number of results with each search. I suppose this is one way too do search for blogs on topics your interested in, but would not be the one I would use