Podcasts!

Initially I was excited to be learning about podcasts as I often hear radio broadcasters alluding to them and wondered what they were??......sounded rather mysterious etc etc!
However I haven't had a great experience with them so far! I seem to have spent more time on this exercise than the others just trying to work out how they work!
I think I was expecting a YouTube type experience rather than a listening to a radio type format.
Podnova's top 40 seemed more user friendly. I clicked on to to the NPR News site which brought up lots of news items which were all dated in August which seemed old news. I then clicked onto the link at the bottom of 'Michelle Obama: family is focus of Denver speech' which brought me into lots of up to date world news sites and RSS's as well as lots of topic feeds of such things as book and film reviews etc.
I guess reporters and journalists know their way around and find lots of useful titbits but by the end of this exercise I thought there were quicker and more accessible ways of finding what you want elsewhere!

http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=2062054

YouTube

What fun - well some were and some were a little bit boring!
I spent most of my time in the library videos, the ones that appealed were the warped sense of humour ones!, my favourite being 'Library zombies' - the link is below.

'Now your library is open late night too' is also quite good.

These sorts of videos would appeal to our teens - it could be a great way of advertising teen events on our website.

What I found disheartening was the different library settings, many had narrow rows of high shelving and staff sitting behing desks with their head in a computer! aaaaaha! We're trying to get away from all of that!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUxp3E3YUdQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUxp3E3YUdQ

Web 2.0 Awards

I went straight to the shortlist to browse and it was interesting to see that quite a few of the sites we have been looking at were on it.
Some sites with catchy names caught my eye:

Under category Niche Social networking Mothersclick was worth looking at, babies, kids, recipes, handy hints, clothes, furniture, fathers click too! They must go online in the middle of the night after the family is in bed!!

How about under Classified and Directories there is Parking Search.com - you too can find a parking space to buy, sell or rent out!

Then there is Twitter in the Social networking category........

But my favourites were Yelp and City search under Guides and Reviews, mainly because I would like to go to New York next year so I wanted to see what they offered in the way of easily accessible information. City search especially was easy to navigate around, the links were clear and visible and there were lots of interesting titbits!
Now all I have to do is get saving.....!

ZOHO

ZOHO ZOHO it's off to work we go!

This is fun!

Well it was - and then the programme kept freezing and it became very frustrating! but that was the fault of the internet and not the programme I believe!

I like the layout of Zoho writer, it is very user friendly, quite good instructions and colourful. The zoho show for doing an online presentation looked great too.

PS. I wanted to do a lot more eg paste a picture but the system got slower and slower and I ran out of steam! I must come back to this website and play around some more though.

Technorati Tags blog,zoho

Rollyo

Maybe if I spent another hour on this site I might 'get it' but time is an issue and I 've had a play around. The NSL instructions were easy to follow and I set up 2 search rolls but am not sure what happens next!
I can see the benefits of accessing your own trusted search engines for a specific passion or interest and the search rolls I had a look at were interesting eg. rare book library search and public domain e-book search but.........!
For reference work in the library would it be the equivalent of our Fitch?
Not a particularly user friendly site.

http://www.rollyo.com/savvyblanc/

Library Thing.

This site reminds me of an expanded version of my reading history!
Lots of added features and a chance to recommend, review and tag items of interest.
I did some author searches to create my book list and was surprised that some of the titles I was looking for were not displayed?
A Library Thing widget would be a welcome addition to our webpage, once again I love the tagging aspect as an alternative for helping to find what you are looking for.
A fun site.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/savvyblanc


ttp://www.librarything.com/catalog/savvyblanc

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