#20 YouTube Zorba the Greek Yolngu style

Where is Conan the Librarian when you need him? I thoroughly enjoyed having another look around YouTube. There's an enormous amount of material here. The recent Federal election showed that politicians were aware of the enormous influence of YouTube in popular culture (and also that the art of political satire is alive and well). Check out the ABC's Unleashed site for their poll of the most popular election videos.

While on YouTube I had a look at some of my favorites including the weird and wonderful Kransky sisters, also the mad antics in my favourite bookshop with Bernard and Manny of Black Books.
It was hard to choose just one to share but I decided on the wonderful Yoglnu Dance Troupe and their version of Zorba the Greek. It's been an enormous hit on YouTube and the dancers have been invited to a Canberra arts festival on the strength of it. Enjoy!

#22 Audiobooks or "The end is in sight"

Very interesting to have a look at what's happening in the world of audiobooks and the potential for libraries to offer this service via internet downloads. The World eBook site was fun to have a play with. There's a lot of old, out-of-copyright material here and it's a great resource for this kind of thing. Lots of literary classics - Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare sonnets, some obscure sci-fi from Baen books. I had a listen to some of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, some Andrew Marvell and Edgar Allan Poe. However, as is always the case with audiobooks the quality and style of the reader are very important.It's also interesting to see what's happening with Project Gutenberg.

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts

I've encountered podcasts before but had no idea that there were actually directories available to find podcasts on different subjects. Previously I've just encountered them by accident when searching different websites. I can see lots of opportunitites for the library to take advantage of podcast technology. Our Eastern Regional Library radio show is now available as a podcast. It would be great to have some of our visiting author talks available as a podcast. Podcasts would also be useful for small tutorials for library users, similar to the manner in which we've been using them in our Library 2.0 learning. The SirsiDynix institute offer a number of library related podcasts which sound interesting. Lots of stuff on podcasts, RSS feeds, Library 2.0. I've added this to my bloglines account along with Radio Nationals' The Book Show, one of my favorite ABC radio shows which I always seem to miss.

Posting from Zoho Pt.2

Well, there it is on the blog. Like everyone else I've lost the little emoticons on the way. Next time I'll just leave them out. The rest of it's there and it was easy to post from Zoho.

#18 Posting from Zoho

The Six Stages of the Novice Blogger

1.FEAR I can't do this. It's for IT specialists and anime fans.
2.CONFIDENCE  Hey, it's easy. I might start 2 or 3 of these.
3.DISMAY  I didn't mean that to happen. How do I edit that post? There's bits missing. Oh-no, is it something to with HTML?
4.OBSESSION I just have to keep tinkering with this until i get it right. I need to add this widget and how about a whole new template because i hate this colour-scheme and i think i'll just look at this blog and this blog and this blog....
5.PARANOIA No-one will ever bother to read this. I'm not sure they should. What a waste of time.
6.ACCEPTANCE Hey, it's not so bad after all. It's starting to look like a real one.

RELATED TERMS:

bloggus interruptus: The phone rang before i finished my post.
blogtired: Time to take a break.
blogjam: 1.Reading too many blogs at one time.
         2.Nice with toast.



Technorati Tags     zoho,blogs

#18 Online Productivity Tools

I've had a look at Zoho.Its seems to me quite a useful idea to have a web-based application. No carting round the old memory stick. No problems with different word-processing application etc.
Let's see how i go posting to my blog.

#19 Web 2.0 Awards

I've had a good trawl through the Web 2.0 awards - a few we've already encountered in our Learning 2.0 experience. Blog guides Technorati and Bloglines are there although Findory seems to have left town. Picasa is a great photo-sharing site and Wetpaint seemed to be a really easy tool for building wikis. In the library I might use and show people Reader2.com which shares a lot of similarities with Librarything, although it's nowhere as comprehensive. There's lots of fun stuff too. An absolutely fiendish but absorbing game is the "Guess the Google image-guessing game" where you have to guess the keyword that goes with the images. I've put a little widget on my blog that gives a "quote of the day" using Springwidgets and now I'm more than ready to relax with a suggestion from the cocktail builder. Slainte.