Podcasts

I decided to look for the podcasts from Lincoln City Libraries in each of the podcast directories. Podcastalley and the iTunes podcast page brought up the current podcasts from LCL quickly. Podcast.com didn't bring up any podcasts from Lincoln City Libraries and what I found in the Podcast Directory was way out of date.

I subscribed to the Lincoln City Libraries podcasts in both Google Reader (my preferred reader) and Bloglines. The specific podcast that I wanted came up in both. I just happened to be my first podcast book talk and I had been waiting for an excuse to listen to it. What I liked best about Google Reader was that there was a fast forward (or tab) so I could get to my part of the joint venture (the middle of the cast) without listening to the whole thing. In Bloglines, I didn't find that feature, so I just had to listen. FYI, my podcast was #29 in the Casting About series from Lincoln City Libraries. In the future I will need to speak louder and stay closer to the mic, as I kept fading away. (Of course, that's part of my pattern of speech).

Pachelbel Rant

My favorite video on YouTube is Rob Paravonian's Pachelbel Rant. It has had more than 6 million views in the couple of years it has been up. It is 5 star rated with more thn 38,000 ratings. In the video, the musical comedian talks and sings about the 8 notes of the bass line in Pachelbel's Canon and the changes/chords show up in popular music all over the place. I have yet to find a trained musician who doesn't find it funny. For all the humor, the video imparts a tremendous amount of information in a way that is really understandable. Best of all, Pachelbel Rant has spurred copies with subtitles in various languages as well as other videos related to the Pachelbel Canon and Paravonian's rant.

Yes, YouTube has a role in libraries -- in training staff and customers and in public relations. And it could have a place in supporting staff morale. The videos must be short and carefully targeted. And well scripted and presented. Obviously, the production qualities don't have to be the greatest, judging by what's on YouTube. One topic per video, please.

Image Generators

I played with several of the image generators, but the one that was most useful for this exercise was ALA's Mini-Read Poster. It was very easy to use. The main problem I had was not using a jpg for the first try, even though the site said I could use the type of image I tried. I got a message explaining that I needed that jpg format, so I tried another image. Also, the text box was larger than the amount of text that could be added. I saw that I couldn't print the resulting graphic without a license. My ALA mini-read poster is above.

More Flickr Fun

I tried quite a few of the fun with Flickr things. I had fun with Montagr and the Flickr Color Picker. I made montages with westie images -- there are so many westie images it didn't want to stop adding images. For a 3rd party app, I looked at the Norad Santa Tracker.

Then there's Experimental Chia Pet. It was fun to plant the seeds on a photo and watch them grow into a chia pet. Could it have a library use? Possibly for YA activities. Or for staff morale. I don't see a serious enhancement of library service through Experimental Chia Pet.

Photos

I skipped over the Flickr exercises because I was going to be traveling and taking some pictures. It's now time to get back to the Flickr exercises.

I've explored Flickr and discovered more than 1500 pictures of Westies. I couldn't choose just one. I looked over the pictures of Budapest. Since I've yet to join Flickr -- probably next exercise -- I'll use the photo uploader in the blogger, and my own image rather than one from the web. The blogger photo uploader allows either.

The photo is of a part of the CD collection in the music library of Budapest's city library. You can find more about my library visits in Budapest in Polley Music Library's Cadenza posts.

Farecast

I played with Farecast (beta), the number one winner in the travel category. It was easy to use, and had links to several other travel sites for purposes of fare comparisons. In order to get the information, I had to click to allow pop-ups. It also allowed me to use the airport codes, giving me boxes to choose from, but not requiring me to click anything in the box when I had typed a matching code. It was not forcasting fares for any of the international flights I was looking at from Lincoln, but then I wasn't expecting it to -- that would take going back in a few days or weeks to look for the same flights.

Apps

Well, we use Google Docs for sharing schedules and other stuff, so I know how easy it is to use. Really neat are the form templates. Why keep redesigning the wheel when the basis of what you need is already there. And, best of all, it's the same user name and password as the other Google account things. So much for this thingy -- apps.