March 27, 2007 at 4:33 am (Gabcast, Juice, Mashup, Mindpicnic, Podcast Alley)
I have been experimenting with different tools and sites in the last week. We were asked to listen to some podcasts and in doing so I came across a couple of sites on podcasts. The first is a media aggregator called Juice which automatically downloads podcasts and media files to your computer. It is an open source, free software which manages podcasts in multiple media formats and is also cross-platform. I have downloaded it to my laptop. It is useful when you can’t listen to an audio programme when it is scheduled. It has a built-in directory with thousands of podcasts. The second site is Podcast Alley. This site is also a media feed which manages podcasts and lists the ten most popular ones as voted by users for a month at a time. There is a vote button next to the listings. An interesting concept is offered by Gabcast. It is a podcasting and audioblogging platform that offers free service to create and publish your podcast. Once you have made and published your recording (e.g.interview, greetings, lecture) by using a phone or VoIP a feed is generated to your channel. You can use it by embedding a Flash audio player into your website or blog and communicate with your friends, students, cusotomers etc.
Some of the other tools I looked at are Mindpicnic. This is an online e-learning website which is self-directed. It empowers its users to create and learn from user-generated content. You can sign up from a list of courses such as in French, Business, Computer and receive a reading list with assignments. You use flashcards and Mindpicnic keeps track of your progress through “red and green bars”. This is a very tough programme as Mindpicnic thinks that if your score is under 92% you need to read the book again! Sounds very challenging. The courses are rated by its users and tagged. Best of all the courses are free!
Finally, I have come across an application called Mashup which is a term taken from music, meaning a genre of songs made up of parts from other songs. Applying this to web techonology, this term is used when people are creating a hybrid technology using content, feeds, google, yahoo and other web sites, and mixing it all together to create a world wide web of a new dimension and with new problems of expropriation of content and ideas. The mashups are also ocurring in video and podcasts. I think that this innovative use of web technologies is bound to change the way the web is being used by most of us.
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March 17, 2007 at 3:14 am (Uncategorized)
This coined word is made up of the words ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’. It is aptly named for its attributes. It defines a people generated system of classification or tagging which we are asked to examine in this assignment for Library 2.0. I have had an account in del.icio.us and find it a useful way to store favourite sites. It is also useful as a search tool because the tags which people have used can bring on a new meaning to your original search. Sociologically, it is interesting to let your category take on a new meaning because you learn how people think. Mind you, sometimes this can be irritating, as the tags you find are idiosyncratic and meaningless. Some are subjective and very casual and can almost take you away from your initial search when you are trying to focus on a specific search. I also subsribe to digg, another tagging social content site, which is very similar to del-icio.us in that the ranking system of favourite sites is controlled by the users. Both del.icio.us and digg are dependent upon numbers next to the posts on their pages and these are like popularity votes. I haven’t compared the two in great length as yet. I like the button for del.icio.us and have found the convenience of having it on my browser at work and at home and it is a great feature to have and a quick way to bookmark a site.
I use Flickr to view family photos but have never posted on it. Here is a cool photo. It is great to be able to search by tags in Flickr. Apparently you can make scrapbooks using your photos too, by using categories such as events, or by date or subjects and so on. This is an exciting possibility.
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March 13, 2007 at 7:00 pm (Uncategorized)
I dedicate this blog to Sarah…who demonstrated PBWiki and Paintwiki very efficiently and sat with me so I could get away from my multitasking mode and get something written. I thank her for her patience. I had in the past year logged on to a Reference dept page but did not contribute and did not pursue wikis. I did like PBWiki for its point and click feature but did not like it for the templates as I thought they gave a “false” sense of format because I could backspace the given text and change the predetmined style or font. I like Paintwiki better as I felt freer and was able to navigate in it more easily than the PBwiki. (Sorry, Sarah!)
I think it would be a useful mechanism within the department to collaborate on a task or document without having to wonder which version is the most current or having to look at dates when a document such as in Word, was last created. It would also be great for meeting agendas which can change at the last minute. Secure wikis can be used in a team where not everyone can access the same level of information. This is a great form of communication.
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March 2, 2007 at 5:01 pm (Uncategorized)
I enjoyed reading participants blogs and it is a great way to keep informed of ideas and thoughts of colleagues with whom you don’t keep in touch with otherwise. As to RSS feeds, I have been generally conservative about adding feeds to my already existing account on Bloglines. My subscriptions are to the ETG, Digital Photo Review, Arts Journal, Wired News and the Google Blog. I have made a subject category and hope it will work. I want to have virtual tours of libraries and keep updated with sites all over the world. It would be nice if we had that in our library, especially a virtual tour of the William Ready Division. I look forward to experimenting more with RSS feeds and see how the Firefox interface compares with Bloglines.
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