Monday, September 17, 2007

Week 9

YouTube

One thing I liked about You Tube is that it lets me see things I may have otherwise missed. It's amazing to me how many people will record events and then post them. I had the opportunity to watch Boomsday, which is an amazing fireworks display that is put on every Labor Day. Here is a link to a video of the grand finale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nkOaWfInjg

One thing I disliked about the site was the fact that you didn have to sort through a lot of irelevant search results, depending on what you wanted to see. If I searched for "Newfoundland dog" I got quite a few entries about Newfoundland -- the place in Canada, not the breed of dog.

Podcasting

One of my biggest problems in fnding an interesting podcast was finding one that had been recently updated. Many that I came across hadn't been updated in months. One that had some recent entries was Sunnyvale Public Library which podcasted some of their programs. Some are interesting, but some are very long. I'm not sure I could listen to a presentation for 58 minutes. I'll be interested to track this in Bloglines to see when -- if ever -- another podcast is added.

Audiobooks

Of the different audiobook resources, I liked the OverDrive because of its selection of popular titles. However, the fact that one cannot put the audio titles from OverDrive onto an iPod results in problems for me. If I'm downloading audio, I'm downloading it for convenience. I like to download audiobooks and listed to them while I walk or while I drive. I can't do this if it's not available on my iPod. Though I have to pay to use audible.com, I have found this site to be easy to use when downloading audiobooks.

Maryland 23 Things -- Overall

I enjoyed this program and definitel learned about new resources available on the internet. While there are a few I don't think I'd ever use again, I picked up information and learned about sites that I have incorporated into my everyday internet use. Particularly useful were google docs and the RSS feeds for news. If a program similar to this was offered in the future, I would definitely participate. I feel that the value of what I did learn far outweighed the content that wasn't something I would use again. And even the things I won't use again are good to know just to be familiar with them.