Thing 21

Podcasts are much more prevalent than I'd ever imagined! There are literally thousands of them and on all topics you can think of and several you'd never imagine. I found the Pirate Comedy Show and many podcasts about Harry Potter and Lost. There are libraries doing podcasts to provide publicity for programs and services as well as interviews with literary visitors - take a look at this http://www.lions-online.org/Podcasts.html from the Kankakee Public Library. I can see possible uses for this form of communication in reaching not only patrons, but staff as well, in new ways.

Should we reconsider the old "a picture is worth a thousand words" saying? I'm looking for a microphone, might try my hand at creating a podcast...

Grandpuppy Trading Cards

Thing 19

Just as I'm trying to downsize... more places to buy things! I really liked the Etsy shopping site for unique gifts. Will have to bookmark it for next Christmas. I guess the downsizing would be a place to employ craigslist as a seller. I had heard of craigslist, but who knew about all this other stuff? It seems like many people have similar ideas and I just can't bring myself to have to create another user id and password right now. I will get back to these innovative sites another day. I think of all the things I've seen the online and collaborative methods of creating documents and web pages is the most interesting and exciting. I also think the ability to share information through podcasts and short videos may be quite useful as ways to deliver information and training when classes or staff meetings are not possible.

Thing 18

The green statement below is brought to you by Google Docs* (formerly known as Writely) and was posted directly to th blog with no help from me. I did set up an account in Zoho Writer, but it was unable to post to my blog. I will try from another computer to see if there is some setting in the way...

Now is the time for all good librarians to attempt to complete 23 Things.

Even though I could not publish anything from ZoHo Writer it seems to me to be something that can be promoted to our patrons to expand their software capabilities from computers not so fortunate as to have been equipped with the full gamut of Office applications. I will examine more of the productivity sites later.

All the states I've visited, from 43 things

Clearly there is a large part of the country yet to be seen...

create your own visited states map

Thing 20 - I'm going out of order again!

I found a video I want to post to the wiki if I can so I had to skip to the YouTube section of Learning 2.0 to find out how to do it. I've already seen lots of stuff (mostly funny cat videos) from YouTube but signing up and figuring out how to do embed the video was a bit challenging.
I've seen quite a number of interesting uses for videos including things that might work for staff and/or public training.




Mark Peyko from the Metro Monthly was in the other evening and has been making video presentations of Youngstown historic and architechural topics - these can be found on YouTube as well as on the Metro Monthy website. Very interesting.

Things 16 & 17 -- Wiki cool!

Have been investigating wikis via PLCMC's links and am constructing one in response to discussion at yesterday's meeting. Would a wiki work for us to share thoughts about hot topics? There are certainly lots of places using wikis in interesting ways. have you seen Wiktionary, the dictionarylike companion to Wikipedia? One of the most interesting wikis I saw in this exercise was Library Success where you can see what is being done and working well at other libraries. I also thought the Princeton Public Library book review wiki was interesting. I played in the PLCMC's sandbox and posted my blog there. Onward to the next thing...