#21 Podcasts Have Nothing to do With Whales

According to podcast.net, Podcast Alley, and Yahoo Audio there are no podcasts about me. That's funny, because I was interviewed for a podcast last year. Check out the May 25, 2006 episode of Mr. Ron's Once a Week. It probably doesn't show up on a search because my name doesn't appear in the written description. I did find a weekly podcast about circus freaks called The Human Marvels and added it to my Bloglines account. I already had a science fiction show saved there.
Podcasts are broadcast with many forms of software players so there seems to be something for everyone.
Libraries are starting to use podcasts for news, storytime, booktalks, author interviews, etc. There appears to be a variety of on-line tools to create podcasts. Maybe we should do an audio version of the Library Shhhout-out.

#20 Video Killed the Radio Star

I've been checking out YouTube for quite a while now. You can spend hours there. It's a fun way of getting a glimpse of "where are they now" celebrities, old rock bands, shows from the early days of British TV, and even family members. Yes, my cousin who is a singer is on YouTube. There are clips of his TV appearance on a British TV talent show in the 90's where contestants had to pretend to be famous celebrities, some shaky video of a pub show, and even a clip he loaded of himself landing a plane.

Here he in on Stars in Your Eyes as Bobby Hadfield of the Righteous Brothers.


I was interested in that huge list of other video hosting sites linked to from the Learning 2.0 site. Whew! Who would have the time to explore them all? I see Yahoo videos cropping up more and more these days, though, and some Google video.

I like YouTube's social networking aspect where you can find out more about the person who posted the video and find out their other posts. The comments can be interesting, although there are a lot of trolls.

YouTube might be a good way of sharing programming tips with other libraries or among staff. You'd have to watch out about violating copyright, however, and only use fair use portions of copyrighted materials. It would be great for displaying programs with content created by the participants, though--like improvised drama, booktalks, poetry readings, etc. Permissions would have to be obtained from the performers. Promotional pieces for the library could be produced and linked to YouTube from other sites.