#21 podcasting

I've been aware of podcasting for awhile since some of the online journals I frequent have their own feeds, but I've never been all that excited to listen to them. I don't listen to the radio all that much and when I'm in my car or relaxing at home I'll put on cd's or records so that I can listen to music that I actually want to hear. But in the spirit of trying something new I went ahead and subscribed to NPR's story of the day podcast and added the RSS feed to my bloglines account.

#20 Youtube and the almighty $

Youtube is a very dangerous site. If you are not careful, you can get sucked in and spend way too much time looking at old commercials. On several occasions I have meant to only briefly visit youtube to look at some video someone has emailed me about and suddenly I realize that an hour has magically vaporated. Since this learning 2.0 project started youtube has been having some legal problems and just wednesday was sued by Viacom for a billion dollars. Can youtube get control of its copyright issues with so many anonymous posters? I think probably not and this will be the beginning of the end for youtube, unfortunately. If it wasn't for the amazing news footage clips, the most talked about moment of a hot tv show, or nostalgic commercials (all posted by fans who don't own the material) would anyone stick around to watch lame video diaries all day? I don't think so.
Already several clips I had placed in my favorites folder have been deleted by youtube. The hardest part is that technology is faster than the laws used to govern these things so now that youtube is a hit everyone wants to get paid. It makes sense in the way the music industry put an end to Napster because of all the illegal file sharing, (except instead of music it's the latest slap fight from an episode of the Real World) but it kinda ruins it for everyone else.

Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I browsed the list of winners from Web 2.0 and was surprised to see several sites I already frequent were listed on there. I decided to check out one I was not familiar with and played around on wists which is like a social shopping list with pictures. It's a cool idea - now when I make a wish list for xmas I can include photos so I can make sure I get the exact item I want. I used to sell my crafts off of my website, but perhaps I could list an item on wists and get more hits.
I tried to think how some of these sites could be used in a library setting. I suppose reference could use some of them to direct patrons using the internet to different sites depending on what they are searching for. I thought some of the mapping sites were helpful if you were new in town and needed to look up information from local haunts to four star dining.

Web-based Apps

So I tried out Zoho writer which could've been really useful a few months ago when my husband upgraded my computer and I freaked because it didn't have Word on it. Eventually I got my hands on a copy of MS Office, but for those who can't or don't want to shell out for an updated version of Office, Zoho could do the trick. I imagine it would be helpful to store frequently used documents there too: your resume could always be just an internet conection away or you could back up important documents if your computer were to die and burst into flames taking all your back up discs and thumb drives with it.
My only concern is how secure this information would be. Last summer I had to deal with someone stealing my credit card number over the internet, if I loaded my resume on Zoho or Google docs would I have to worry about someone having access to that very personal information too?
There's lots more exploring I'll have to do.

playing with wiki

I'll have to play around with wiki more later when I don't have so much to do, but for the most part it seemed fairly easy. I added my blog to the favorites section and although I followed the wiki style guide but still couldn't get my link to look "pretty." Oh well, maybe later.