Week 9 - #21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

Podcast are the new ‘in’ they are being used to communicate information.

I have listened to quite a few over time but I will have to say I prefer the video podcasts to the audio podcasts. I do not think I would ever make one myself I think my voice is not the best for casting messages.

As part of the week 9 task we were asked to check out a couple of websites that offer podcasts, I tried them all but did not found anything interesting except that Yahoo closed its podcast directory, effective October 31st there are still plenty of places to find podcasts. Therefore, I went looking in other places.

I visited the Library of Congress and found they introduced podcasts, I added National Book Festival Authors Do Podcasts to my blogines feed (see above) and also I have add one from Orange County Library Systems (OCLS) they offer video podcasts you can subscribe to RSS feeds from both these sites. I looked at the Victorian State Library and the National Library of Australia and could not find any obvious reference to podcasts they may have them but I could not find them.

I can see a future for podcasts within libraries if anyone is brave enough to do the voice over.

Week 4 - RSS feeds- Bloglines

RSS feeds, do we really need them, maybe not, but could they be an advantage to us, yes they can be. Do you, like me, surf the net find interesting web sites and forget to write the address for future reference. RSS feeds is way to overcome this.
Most web sites have a RSS feed and subscribing to the feeds from your favourite site gives you continues information without you going back the web site.
Libraries could send out feeds about new addition to the collection, events that will be happening and I’m sure there are many more ways that RSS feeds would useful for Libraries.
For my own personal use I use Google reader and have four folders with feeds coming in, from these feeds I gain a lot of knowledge on a lot of different subjects.
For the benefit of this exercise I have subscribed to Bloglines and added 10 feeds. It was not difficult to set up a Blogline account or to add the feeds; the hardest part was working out how get a URL address for my public bloglines account but persistent works and here are my RSS feeds through Bloglines here click on the RSS feed icon