Thing #21~ Podcasts

I do love my iPod, but I've not really gotten into podcasts that much. I have a geriatric computer at home and I need to use my Dad's machine to sync my iPod and add music which pretty much limits the time I can spend exploring for things like Podcasts and since I do that maybe once a week if I happen to have new CDs to add which means I can't really keep up with podcasts. But I'll poke around a little with them for this exercise. I checked out the Podcast listing sites (Podcast.net and PodcastAlley.com were much more useful than the Yahoo one) and I really didn't find anything terribly interesting in terms of libraries. Lots of the library podcasts were for specific libraries, or they hadn't been updated in awhile. I found a lot of people across a lot of subjects started a podcast, posted an episode or two and then gave up on it. I did however find some podcasts related to my other interests. I found a really cool food podcast and The Signal, a super Firefly/Serenity podcast. Added them both to Bloglines which makes them show up on my blogroll.

Thing #20~ ITube,YouTube, we all Tube!

Well, I'm quite familiar with YouTube already before this exercise as are most folks my age. YouTube is pretty much as ubiquitous as MySpace. I added two videos to my blog to illustrate the different ways in which people use YouTube. The first is the amazing Loreena McKennnitt performing her beautiful song "Dante's Prayer" live at the Alhambra Palace in Spain, and the second is a "Farscape" music video that some friends of mine created using the song. Oh yeah, and I got to see Loreena twice this year live-- first time from the second row, second time from the first row. It was amazing :-)

Thing #19~ Web 2.0 Awards

For this Thing I chose to check out a couple of the sites on the list. I noted that I've already explored a lot of the sites on the list as part of other Things-- like Google Docs, Rollyo, Flickr, YouTube, and de.li.cious are all there.

CocktailBuilder.com is truly awesome. Not only are there drink recipes, which can be found a million places on the web, but you can work backwards too. You enter which kinds of liquors and mixers you have on hand and the site keeps narrowing the list of drinks down until it shows all the drinks you can make with these ingredients. You can view the drink recipe right there on the screen too without losing what you've entered. You can even make a bar menu, too!

Pandora.com is very awesome. A commercial-free, adaptive, Internet radio! I love it! I made "stations" for several of my favorite artists and I must say they are pretty spot-on in their recommendations. Very easy to use too. I could sit there all day and do this :-)

Of course neither of these would seem very useful in a library setting, although I'd imagine patrons sometimes ask for bartending manuals and CocktailBuilder is an online alternative. Also, recommending Pandora to customers could definitely boost circulation of music CDs as people discover new music.

Thing #18~ online productivity tools

Well, I tried out Google Docs and I found it to be pretty cool that I can access a word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation program anywhere, anytime, when I've got an Internet connection. I don't personally have a whole lot of need for such a thing but I can see the many uses including library customers. Here in Howard County we now have OpenOffice on all our PACs, but in the old days you had to sign up for a time slot on one of the computers that had a word processor on it if you needed to type a paper or something. Web-based software is making this more and more obsolete. Google Docs and such services are also good for shared files, moving shared drives and folders and things toward obsolescence as well.

Web-based software is all well and good, but what happens if your Internet is down and you can't get to the web? With a regular application such as OpenOffice or MS Office, you can continue to work, but if your office depends on something like GoogleDocs, you're up the creek till the net is fixed, but I don't see many institutions wholly dependent on such things, at least not yet.

Thing #15~ Library 2.0

To me, Library 2.0 means a step forward in terms of technology but staying firmly rooted in our original role as a place for the public to learn and explore. The terminology of "2.0", "2.1" and such is borrowed from software developers who give each version of a piece of software a number to denote the improvements in each version, even if those improvements are invisible to the end user but help the software run more reliably or faster. Library 2.0 is a lot like that in that it is not only a concept that is helping us improve on the outside and making the library a more interactive place for the customer with all kinds of new features, but it's also helping us shore up our original structure and repair or replace some ideas and concepts on the back end that have needed fixing for awhile.

That's my $.02 on 2.0 :-)

Thing #16~ wikis

Wikis are a great method of collaborative learning and cooperative efforts. I particularly liked the Subject Guides one and how it ties in with that library's catalog and highlights parts of the collection customers might be interested in in a different way. Perhaps because I'm so ADD I love all of these different types of information about the same subject all in one place. I'm a fan of wikipedia too, although I wasn't in school when it became all the rage to use it as the only resource for one's work. I can imagine it must be the bane of some teachers' existence ;-) I think it's a great jumping off point, sort of like how Cliffs Notes are good to use as a supplement to the original work of literature. Plus wiki is fun to say. WIKI! Although I never knew what it stood for until I heard it explained one time, it means What I Know Is :-) What I know is, wikis are neat!

Thing #17~ Sticki Wikis

I added an entry to the Learning 2.0 Sandbox Wiki. Check it out!