Et Tube? (Week 8)

YouTube is a huge playground, one I see a lot of kids playing on at the branch, not to mention all the embedded players in lots of blogs I visit. It can be a pretty useful tool, too. A cuople of months ago when I was all curious about what krumping looked like, bingo. Even a tutorial! and, as usual, librarians are all over this, with a ton of great library vids posted. Me, I like the silly, also as usual.

This first video is a fun little spoof about two librarians who formed a rock band:



And this little rant (and who hasn't wanted to go off like this once in a while?) is from my favourite movie, Party Girl. And doesn't Parker Posey look young? This flick needs a re-viewing sometime soon.



But what about more, um, practical uses? I think one thing that we provide that lots of people don't think of is our programming. Recording and posting some of our great author readings and visits, for example, could be a great way to communicate the kind of extras people can expect from us. This I think would be especially true of a teen audience, a group that could be reached easuily on youtube, where they live. Perhaps a YAG could put together a programme or a short movie for posting, for example. The tricky thing here will be with the permissions. We'd need to have the author's permission, but also either be careful about filming in such a way that we could either avoid needing other permissions or make clear what was happening and that it would be posted online. It's a little more problematic still with the idea of a YAG performing something - parental permission would likely be needed, but for regulars like YAG members, that might still be do-able.

Pod People

Podcasting is something I haven't used much because, frankly, I don't run around with a player any longer and I just don't have time for sitting around listening to stuff. I imagine that if you commuted in a car or listened to your iPod on the subway, this would be a great source of interesting material. Me, I read instead, so while I went and poked about, I haven't subscribed to anything (I hae quite enough in my bloglines as it is!). I noted a lot of talk shows, lots of politics, lots of tech talk, and piles of interviews with authors, and so on. As I say, interesting if you are likely to listen.

I have made podcasts at Odeo and imbedded a player in my blog before, which is fairly easy, but it would probably behoove me to get a better microphone before I start any bigger projects, because it was very faint.

I like the library's use of podcasting on kidspace for stories, and could see that it would work well for author talks, too, as a means of giving access to more people to hear them. I have missed a few that I might have made a point of listening to, for example, and I am certain I'm not alone.

What's Up, Docs?

I like this! It's kind of like the X drive concept combined with a built-in app. I can see this being really great for someone who travels a lot and needs to be able to write on the go, especially if they have an editor that they need to work with, too. A travel writer, for example. Or for business travel while simultaneously working on projects back home with a team. Or group work in school, especially if you are doing school long-distance. I assume it has all the same kind of features for editing and sharing that MS Word does, too, with different soloured squiggles and strikethroughs and so on? Fantastic. (Though I did find the limited font choices a little pitiful, given the computing power Google possesses.)

For me, though, there is one thing that just makes me nervous, because I'm paranoid like that. You are entrusting your document and the saving of it to someone else and their servers. Not to say nothing ever happens to, say, a diskette or a USB key, which are other options for portable files, or to other email servers you might save it in as an attachment, but it still would make me nervous if it were important, so I'd likely be saving to two places, just to be on the safe side.

Delicious.

I must admit, other than using delicious as a way to find things, I'm not really getting this one. The social aspect of it is sort of eluding me. Perhaps because I dont' really care how many other people are looking at something, or whether they like the same thing I've enjoyed? I did find lots of fun stuff under a few headings and set up my own set of tags for them, but I can't see using them for anything beyond portable bookmarks, really.

This is a bit of a lame entry, but really, this particular application isn't ringing my bell.

Getting Silly Wit' It

Okay, so this week has all been fun and games.

I am LOVING! the Big Huge Labs tools.

I made a movie poster:

And a caption:

And a motivator:

Can I use that last one in the library?

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The generators are great, too. So many things I didn't know, to start with. Like my blues name? Is "Big Mama" Baby Perkins. Which seems a little internally contradictory, but whatever. Apparently I'm an enigma wrapped in a riddle and tied up with a conundrum or something. (Since I refuse to admit to being an oxymoron.)

And I generated some sudoku, since I am, as so many sadly are, completely obssessed. Sigh.

I have also enjoyed the South Park Alice:

and a few other avatar creators and such.

And those randomized generators, which are fun for a few moments. Like the motorcycle gang name (The Pea Ridge Mustache Minions Rule!) and the Elizabethan Insult generator. Yes, you heard that right. Thou darest not believe me, thou mewling rough-hewn flap-dragon?!

Oh alright, back to work... Sigh.

Bloglines

I've actually been using bloglines for a while now to read a large number of blogs, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40-45 of them, though I try to keep it down. Especially because, on a week like this past one, where I was literally sick all week, I came back to find well over a hundred items! That kind of backlog is a bit nerve-wracking for me because I missed some important news from some people I have come to know through blogs.

I suppose I might feel differently if I were using it for only professional articles, thinking that missing one article about how a librarian in Arkansas was making a difference or something like that, I wouldn't feel as attached to not missing anything. I think though, that to get book reviews, for example maybe SLJ reviews, that way would be really great, because I find the wait for the paper copy to go around to all the branches in the district can be a bit much.

For some professional sites and news-type feeds, too, I find the volume a bit daunting, and sifting through to be annoying. So for those, I still do it the old-fashioned way and go to the website. It would be perfection for a journalist, for the really active bloggers like BoingBoing staff, or for serious news jjunkies, though.

Fun with Flickr

Okay, any obscure topic in Flickr groups? Oh, yeah.

I checked out a few hobbies and found groups on stained glass and cross-stitch. The group that made me laugh was the Subversive Cross-Stitch group. Samples?

Here's a library science T-shirt in the waiting:

And a sample of the cleaner "subversive" mottos going:

I really liked one that said, "Girl... Don't Make Me Cut You!" but oddly, every time I loaded it, it didn't show, although Blogger seemed to think it was loaded. Hmmm. I've only had trouble with Blogger photo loading once or twice before, but I couldn't resolve this one.

I loved the Harajuku section of the geotagged photos, though I found Toronto's oddly dull. Sigh.

The tag cloud for popular tags was fun, too, just for browsing. Locations were big, as were predictable things like party, or wedding. The one that I thought was fun and surprising and I liked best was yellow.