Podcasts

I have been listening to National Radio's radio replay of interviews not subject to copyright restrictions, done by the Nine to Noon presenter, and Kim Hill for quite some time, so was interested to see what was on offer from the podcast directories.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio for those who are interested in listening to National radio programmes.

I looked at podcastpickle, podcastalley and the yahoo audio search.
I liked the yahoo audio search best as it was very clear, and easy to follow and search on.
I did a "library" search in all three directories and found that alot of the material was quite irrelevant. I think a good sense of humour goes along way when searching for material via these directories as there is alot of weird and wonderful (and not so wonderful) material out there.

You Tube: "Non, Je ne regrette rien"

I found you tube frustrating as I could not download videos from home as our internet connection was too slow and it took a very, very long time to play the video clips. In the library it was very easy to look at a multitude of clips, but I was very conscience of the fact that I had very limited time to do this exercise.
I can see why people love accessing you tube in the library as it eliminates the frustations experienced when using dial up internet access.

Web 2.0 Awards

And the Winner is.........
I found the number of categories and the sheer number of sites to choose from abit over whelming so went into the short list and as I am a dedicated follower of food and anything of a culinary nature I looked at Im Cooked and Urbanspoon.
As I don't have broad band at home decided to by pass looking at the video recipe sharing site in favour of the restaurant review/maps/menu site.
It is very American, with only Melbourne, Sydney and London listed outside of US/Canadian cities. It is a pity that it did not have a New Zealand city (cities) included.
However having said that, the Melbourne site was very good and I found it easy to find information about restaurants, either by suburb, types of food and price. I also did a search on a restaurant were I deliberately misspelt the name and I was directed to an Alphabetical index where I easily found the restaurant.
The Urbanspoon site could be quite a handy site for information centres to have listed as a search site (Not in New Zealand) for tourists to search on when visiting cities. It could also be that as libraries increase the scope of their services that information like recommending a good restaurant could become a question that is asked, after all we can never really predict the scope and nature of the enquires that will come our way!

Zoho Writer: Word Processing Tool

I have been trying to publish my scribblings by posting to my blog as instructed, but it would not recognise my logon or password, then when it did access my blog it still would not publish so not sure what I was doing wrong. Have copied and pasted instead, minus the smiley faces which did not come across with the text.
Well here I am in Zoho Writer. It was very easy signing up to this online tool but did take awhile to load (have slow internet access), but now I am here it looks very easy to use. The icons are well laid out and the program appears to be very user friendly. Could be a very useful tool for a school writing group who have to work collaboratively.
The one problem I have found is there is no down bar on side or across bar at bottom for scrolling across and down the page.
Love the smiley face icons. Very Cool!!

Rollyo

This exercise has taken me longer to complete than I had hoped. Initially I did not fully understand what it was all about. Once I had created an account and created a search roll it all became clear, and I was able to find other search rolls which had web sites that were also of interest to me.
I was very pleased that when I added a search roll to my blog by following the instructions as listed, the steps were very clear and straight forward.

http://www.rollyo.com/aliceminwonderland/

Library Thing

I really enjoyed doing this exercise. I am an avid book reader and belong to a book discussion group and quite often find myself remembering a book and not quite remembering the full title or author, and lamenting the fact that I don't have all the books I have read recorded in one easy to find place. ( Recording in the back of old diaries and on scraps of paper is not a very efficient way of keeping track of all those volumes!)
I found Library Thing such an easy way of recording books. So simple to just search for a title, click on it and have it go into "Your Library". It was simple to add tags, either at time of title search or once title is added to your library. The bonus of this site is that there are plenty of reviews and recommendations and shared social data. I am sure that this online tool would be very beneficial for readers advisory and for getting ideas for the next great read.

http://www.librarything.com/home/aliceminwonderland

Image Generators

I enjoyed looking at many of the different image generators and found it quite hard to decide what to include in my blog. So much to choose from....so little time. Definitely a fun activity.