Week Nine

Well between week eight and week nine, both were very challenging, time consuming and frustrating. Evem though I'm a cat, new tricks don't come easy, especially when there is little time in the day. These are great tools of entertainment and information, perfect for someone with lots of time on their hands. Now I know why I haven't done either before. As with myspace and podcasting, I just can't seem to figure out how to invite friends that I know. I really don't want to know perfect strangers. Us cats are known for our finickiness. Without friends e-mails, not sure how else to do this. Probably the most frustrating part of this whole exercise. Besides that aspect, Youtube was very easy to use. The hardest part was finding a user name that wasn't already taken. My URL is http://youtube.com/King27kitty. I chose Mr. Bean at the library since I was in some desperate need of some humor. Frustrating that I couldn't get it to sit nicely on my blog...you will notice you can't view the entire screen shot of the video. You may want to go to Youtube and search Mr. Bean and Library...it really is worth a good laugh. I also found a number of music videos and created a playlist (you will see at the very bottom of this blog). I was quite impressed with the wide variety of music available with videos, especially the "old" stuff. Adding the video and the playlist to the blog was very easy..the embedding stuff. At first it wasn't intuitive because I thought it was a "video" but it isn't...it is a java thingymahopper. Just exploring Youtube was hours so didn't explore other sites. Most interesting thing I learned is that if one has no life at all, they can never complain about being bored. Youtube could keep one amused for years. If you ran out of things to watch, you could then learn how to upload videos which actually would be very cool too. Using Youtube in a library setting might be interesting, especially to broadcast a public licence approved movie remotely. In-house it might be frustrating because it might stop and start quite occassionally as I experienced with some of the videos this evening. It might also be a way to broadcast author visits, special programs such as the Russ Parsons program, or concerts. Since I learn much better by "seeing" than "audioing" Youtube was a great visual help in showing me how to use Youtube.
Podcasts were interesting though I never did figure out how to put my podcast site onto this blog. I finally gave up. I chose podnova.com as my choice for podcast downloads. Some interesting ones that I found were:
The La Porte Report http://leoville.com (yep I'm a nerdy cat) and YaBookcast at yabookcast.libsyn.com which I found fun. Horn book had a podcast too but I couldn't figure out how to get it into my podnova profile. I think I would find podcasts useful, especially for professional development and training and keeping up with new and relevant information. It would be fun to do a podcast of new materials for specific age ranges as it would be another way to reach people. You know how people and cats can be, we never read signs, much less lists.
Other libraries using podcasts include Sunnyvale and Denver Public Library. Sunnyvale had both audio and video broadcasts of library programs and "voice" stories...actually pretty cool. Denver Public Library did booktalks which was also cool. podcast.denverlibrary.org/. This learning is hard on the brain...time for a cat nap.