final thoughts.......

Well I have to say that I'm kinda sad that this little exercise is coming to end. It wasn't nearly as painful as I had thought it would be. I have some fond memories of discovering new goofy things that are out on the web. I am finally a blogger, I really thought that I would never find a need for blogging, but after discovering Tumblr, I can say that i have found a new way of blogging that works for me. I feel so much more tech savvy than I was before. I feel like I have much better grasp of what kind of interactive sharing tools are available how they can actually be useful to me in my everyday life.
I had a situation the other day where I had forgotten the text to a story I'm trying to illustrate with my sister. I remembered though that she had placed it on Google docs! I was able to go online where I was at and pull up a copy of the text and stay productive that day! It was awesome! I'm definitely going to try and keep up with all the new technologies.
I'm also a big fan of Bloglines. It is great not having to to go and check ten different websites to see if there is any new info posted, or whether my favorite blogs have any new info. Thats another thing, I never even looked at blogs before web 2.0 and now there a few that I have to checkout each day because they are so cool and informative.
Thanks to all of you who gave me the opportunity to check out all this cool random stuff!

Tumblering, timbling, down

I really think that this tumblr is a way wicked cool fast way of doing a blog. Instead of having to go through all the trouble of having complex blog , or a separate connection with tags like delicious, you can do it all quick and dirty with tumblr. I don't know what other people plan on doing with tumblr, but I plan on using it to post art that I do, just sketches or maybe a week by week page from my childrens book that my sister and I are working on. What is also cool is the ability to see some cool photo and add it quick and easy to your tumblr where you'll be able to find it later. I really like it for art, as you can see. I can also see it used for posting quick little installments of a story or an easy or two.

internet video killed the radio and the tv star

So I ran around looking at all the sites. While many of them are very fine and dandy, I would say that YouTube is still boss. I mean literally you can find anything on that crazy site. What I ended finding that was something I hadn't thought about looking at before were the how to videos. There is a guy on there that does quite a few videos on how to watercolor and the many techniques involved. So basically a Bob Ross video on watercoloring, but at my own speed and for free. How cool is that?! I could easily see those do it yourself and learning tools being applied to our library website. Wouldn't it be great if we even had more videos about how to use the library and the tools within the library. For example, show some videos of how best to look up items using the catalog, or show a video on how to use the microfilm machine. Or even better you could have information videos about art like what I found, or how to build a fence, cement a walk, whatever. You could just keep adding to it all the time.

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.