Week Nine, Thing 21

When I first heard about podcasting, I said to myself, "Why would anyone want to download a podcast to their iPod? It's like listening to talk radio or something. People pay for brief audio clips and listen to them like a track?" Then I found out that podcasts were named after the iPod, but they're really just another audio file. So then it made more sense to think that people would want to be able to add audio clips to web pages and stuff. It wasn't until I had heard about travelcasts that I saw some really cool potential in podcasting. In fact, I only recently heard about this. My husband and I took a few days to check out Philadelphia. While searching for travel info, I ran across some podcasts that you could download to your portable media player. You could listen to a personal guided tour of the historic district. Cool, huh? So, I looked around Podcast Alley to find a podcast of interest. Since I think this travel idea is so cool, I went in that direction. First, I tried to subscribe to a collection of podcasts of Cape Town audio tours. It totally didn't work, but I can download them. So then I checked out the The ZA Show podcast, which is a radio show about things going on in South Africa and Cape Town. It's pronounced "zed-ay" show, BTW. It's a regular podcast from a South African couple. They do news, music, interviews, etc.

What potential do I see for this? I could see some Ghost Walk possibilities! We could do podcasts for do-it-yourself walking tours and for the driving tour of the county. That might be fun!

For this discovery exercise, I didn't do the optional part about making my own podcast. I just didn't have anything to say. If I did, I would. :)

Week Four, Thing 9

Wow! I really have to stop looking around for junk to add to my bloglines page: http://www.bloglines.com/public/ChristinaK. There's no way to keep up with the amount of information I've now inundated myself with. They all looked so interesting though. I had the most fun with Technorati. First of all, the sight was the most eye-catching. Lame, but true. I found a really cool blog for The Lost Girls. A bunch of chicks from NYC quit their jobs to travel the world. I stumbled upon that one when I did a search for South Africa. I tried a few different searches in each of the featured tools. Syndic8 didn't lead me to anything interesting at all. Topix led me to a local news gatherer, so we'll see how that works out. Of course, that means that there has to be actual local news. ;-) If I had a more specific purpose, I might have more insightful things to say. I was really just poking around and looking for fun topics. The Merlin site was easy to add. Bloglines does make it pretty simple. Well, I have about a million feeds to read, so I'd better get to it.

Week Four, Thing 8

I knew of RSS, but I really hadn't paid it a lot of attention. I got news online, but I've never brought the sources altogether through a single access point. So now I have my bloglines account all set up at http://www.bloglines.com/public/ChristinaK. I have all my feeds in a convenient list now, which is pretty alright. Of course, I subscribed to the requisite number of library-related feeds. The Library Bytes blog was pretty cool. It mentioned the Maryland Libraries Learning 2.0 project. Of course, equally as interesting are all of the other feeds to which one can subscribe. OK, maybe not equally. Please - shoes/libraries? shoes/libraries? HELLO? OK, libraries pay for the shoes, so maybe libraries should come out ahead there. ;-) It was lots of fun to find some international news feeds. Also, NASCAR has a Nextel Cup feed, so now I'll know who Jr. signs with. The news is rumored to be coming down the pike pretty soon. Let's hope he signs with Gibbs!