Entering Contest

Here's a link to the WOW Hits 1 website. Great music!

THE END #23

Well, this last post on Web 2.0 and the experience I've had deserves a new color! It's been great fun; well, mostly. Some of the exercises were more tedious than enjoyable, but I feel I got something out of every one, even if it was just that I don't expect to revisit some of them. My favorites were exploring the award winner sites (Web 2.0, that is), and learning about blogging. Quite a few of the things we learned about have now become part of my daily routine, i.e. checking my bloglines, and interacting with my kids on facebook. When I have more time, like when I'm retired, I may even try harder to like Library Thing and Technorati ;)

I guess the best improvement to the format of these exercises would be to build in more time for individuals to get it accomplished. I was sad to see so many start the program and become unable to finish due to time constraints. I'm not sure if extending the overall length would help everyone, but perhaps a few more could have finished. I would definitely choose to participate if another chance to learn was presented...it was enlightening!

#22 Audiobooks

Librivox is a good place to listen to some public domain books, recorded by volunteers to mp3 files for downloading, rss feeding to your bloglines, or just listening to from the website. The catalog was having some issues when I visited the site, but it did seems to have a large number of titles already available, with more being added all the time. I'm all for getting something FREE!

Thing #21 Podcasts

I didn't have a lot of time to spend on this one, but as usual, I'll want to go back and play some more at some later date. I did open up podcastalley.com and was at first not too pleased that many of the top ten podcasts included foul language and extreme political leanings, just in their descriptions. I got brave and explored a bit further and was pleased to find that the directory has many, many podcasts to choose from that I might enjoy listening to. I added one from the "religious/spiritual" category that I'm interested in. It was easy to do and it worked the first time I tried it, even with these icky sounding library computers. I'll look forward to my surround sound speakers at home for future tuning in.

Interruption--Have to Share!

I have to interrupt this litany of exercise reporting to share what happened to me this morning, all because of this Web 2.0 stuff. I was reading my bloglines this morning and in the National Geographic News RSS feeds came across a video about using electricity to restore the coral reefs in Bali. I opened the link and began to watch. Meanwhile, my daughter was reading the morning newspaper, seated at the table nearby. All of a sudden, she started asking, where did you find that video, why are you watching that??? Coincidentally, she was at that exact time reading an article about the very same subject. SNAP!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071205-coral-video-ap.html

#20 Downloadable Music

Today I listened to "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" as sung by Andrew Rowan Summers and played on a dulcimer. It's not part of my regular holiday listening list, but it could be! It was easy to find and loaded and started playing quite quickly (how's that for alliteration?) I'm sure I'll be checking out more of this database in the near future...

#19 Web 2.0 Award Winner Pandora.com

First I have to say that this was a tough assignment, tough because I didn't want to choose just one award winner to look at and play with. I actually peeked at quite of few of them and was impressed by what I found. For this post, I'll just address Pandora, a music oriented site that lets you create your own radio station, just by entering the types of artists or songs you already like. It then adds similar projects to a list that you can then edit, listen to, or delete entirely. Very simple, very nice. At this point I only see the personal application of this one, but if we added sound to the pacs, perhaps patrons could choose pre-made lists of certain genres to listen to. Yeah, yeah, I know, the library is for quiet study ;)

http://pandora.com/