#21 Podcasts

I had a look at the three directories listed - the one I liked the best was podcastalley because it had more book review podcasts. It was a good idea to have us add a podcast as an RSS feed to our bloglines account because I found I'd forgotten how to do it. I had to go back and check and hopefully now I'll remember. I think having podcasted book reviews or book discussions on the library website is a great idea. There are probably many news sources that avid readers listen to for reviews so if they are available from our website it gives people one place to access all those things. There are also a number of online book groups now so we could perhaps look at linking to their discussions from our website.

# 20 YouTube

I have chosen to add the video of Kevin Rudd eating ear wax during question time because I seem to be the only person in the country who hasn't seen it yet. I have added it to my blog just in case there are one or two other people out there who haven't seen it either. YouTube could be used to add topical videos to the library website - just feature one each week or something. There is plenty to choose from following on from the election. It was really slow to load up on the council network and I couldn't really watch the video properly because of this but that's not anything to do with YouTube. I think it would be better if there was a little description of the video so you could choose whether or not you want to view it but I think this is the way it works - it plays on the shock or surprise factor and you get drawn in because you're curious.

#23 Is this really the end?

I really appreciate that we have been given the opportunity to learn about all these great tools as part of our professional development. The struggle (and I know I sound like a broken record) has been to find the time at work to do it. I know many of my colleagues have worked on it at home in order to be able to keep up. I will probably do the same now that the council network won't give me access to YouTube and podcasting. Perhaps if we could have had a little more time to complete the program...?

I have a much better understanding of blogs, podcasting, RSS feeds, Flickr, tagging and all those other things that you hear about today but, up until now, I haven't known much about. I love del.icio.us and I could have spent ages looking around Flickr. I also, now that I've got one, really like having my own blog. Still don't feel really great about other people looking at it but I think I will overcome that angst over time. Oh, and LibraryThing - I really loved that and will use it and attempt to put it on my blog like I noticed someone else did (smartypants!). Once I have done all the prerequisites to get through this course I will spend some time personalising my blog page and making it exactly what I want, building up my del.icio.us account and my LibraryThing collection. I will be adding a lot of the sites that I discovered in this program to my del.icio.us account because I want to come back to them and explore them more fully.

Thanks to everyone involved with setting up and running this program - I have gotten a lot out of it and discovered some great tools along the way.

#22 Audiobooks

I've had to do this a bit out of sequence as the council network is blocking my access to YouTube and podcasts. Hopefully I can jump on someone else's PC that allows access before the deadline for this program. The World ebook Fair site has some good titles on there. I have heard about Netlibrary before at one of the Gulliver forums and I know there are already a few library services out there that have ebooks as part of their collection. I can definitely see the benefit of this and I think it would be readily taken up by our members if we had ebooks as part of our collection. In time they might take over from talking books. Last I heard we couldn't do it because of some system incompatibility...

# 19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I had a look at a couple of the winner sites but they didn't really impress me - I had a look at one in the travel category, one in the book category and one in the business category. Then I had a look at the winner of the City Guides and Reviews category, "Yelp" - this was really good and I think I will come back to it to research my big trip next year. It is my first time overseas so it is great to find a site that real people have rated and written reviews about. It's a shame it is just America, but it does have a lot in it - restaurants, hotels, shops, night life, etc. In terms of use in a library setting - we are doing a travel demonstration early next year so this may be a good site to let people know about at that. I suppose also when people ask for a US travel guide we could also recommend this site to them.

# 18 Web-based Apps

I can see how Zoho Writer could take over from Microsoft Office because it's free but it is also really slow!! I managed to create a document in Zoho Writer and publish it to my post (it's the previous post titled web 2.0) and I can see the benefits of publishing and sharing. I then proceeded to play around in Zoho Notebook because I didn't read the instructions properly (obviously didn't get the chocolate I needed) - that was a little more confusing. Went back to the Writer and worked out how to share the document. Good idea, easy to use, but needs to speed up before I really consider using it.

web 2.0

Cramming this web 2.0 learning was not a good idea. I worked on it most of yesterday and today. I really need some chocolate.