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.
