Although I had never really listened to podcasts before, I was certainly aware of them. Some of my favorite webcomics (like PvP) have podcasts, and my friends love the This Week in Tech podcast. It's kind of a misnomer, I suppose, calling everything a "podcast," when so many of the ones out there (like some of our own at OCLS) are actually "vidcasts," having picture as well as sound, but I digress. As for audiobooks, I have been a member of NetLibrary for a long time (often it was the only way to read librettos of operas for a class that I took). Although I don't prefer to listen to my books (written word all the way!), it's a useful resource for those long drives to and from work. Or at least it was, until my portable CD player was stolen from my glove compartment while I was at work. But now, with the new MP3 player that I will be receiving, I can use that (along with the tape adapter for my old-school car, which was thankfully left in the car) to listen to audiobooks and music!
As a personal recommendation, I would like to suggest this as an audiobook for people who aren't sure what they want to listen to. It's the abridged (which is a tragedy) downloadable audio version of World War Z by Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks, but not known for humor). It's super interesting if you like zombie stories at all, and there are a ton of famous people who do the different voices (like Jurgen Prochnow, Alan Alda, Carl and Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, and John Turturro). It's the kind of audiobook I can really get behind, because the premise of the book is that it's the transcription of several interviews with people from around the world about their experience surviving the Great Zombie War. It lends itself perfectly to an actual audio version, and I think it really enhances the whole experience to both read and listen to it.
I won't have a chance to do the Adventure activity for a while, since we're in the middle of moving and our computers/microphones aren't hooked up yet (or even the internet connection), but I look forward to it! In the meantime, I found this neat website PodSafe Audio, which is full of freely listenable Creative Commons protected music. One of my old professors is even up there. He's a local musician, and if you want to hear the songs he has available just search by artist name for "Barry Mauer." It doesn't really seem like it in the picture on the website, but in person he's a dead ringer for David Duchovny!
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Week 9 of Learn 2.0
The video for this week was fun. I really like the idea of people spontaneously bursting into song in the library! It never happens in real life like it does in musicals, and I have to wonder how many of the people in the library were actually prepped for what was happening.
Copyright is a huge issue right now with the internet. I know I used to get a lot of articles ILLed in college when the full text wasn't available online for use in writing papers, so I'm familiar with the librarian copywright scenarios. But with music? Even with the handy example guidelines in the course links, it seems like in some circumstances, there's still a lot of gray area to be considered. When is it okay? Better not to chance it, I guess. But that doesn't stop some of our patrons who check out 30 CDs and return them the next day. You know what they're doing (and maybe even do it yourself). We trespass people for doing it on library computers, but no one can control what you do from home except yourself (and possibly the RIAA police). But that's where DRM comes in, saving you from the trouble of controlling yourself. In some cases, it's better to be too safe (and not even be able to listen to music purchased) than not safe enough (and have yor music poached online) according to big music labels. But Steve Job's open letter exposes some cracks in the veneer, such as DRM only being required on digital music, but not CDs. When it's just as easy to circumvent the whole process by copying a CD instead of buying albums online, why attempt to control one so much more strictly than the other? With Europe being (apparently) the most affected in terms of not even being able to access purchased music, it's a little surprising that the clamor for attention to this hypocrisy hasn't already led to DRM's demise. I understand that there needs to be some kind of watchfulness by producers of content (I'm not quite ready to condone the open source free-for-all plan yet), but obviously DRM is not the way to go. There will always be someone ready to hack any system, but there's got to be some method of ensuring that artists don't go broke (though it seems like the labels are the ones bleeding them dry, not listeners who pirate) without making it so hard just to listen.
In terms of music recommendations, I didn't really like LivePlasma, which I had already looked at for a previous week. I like that it links to the artist's amazon listing, but the format is too busy looking for me, whereas Music-Map was much simpler and easier to see (even if the artists jiggle and overlap a little too much sometimes, making them hard to differentiate). Music-Map is part of GNOD , which has been linked on the "Children and Teens" section of our own website for a long time. My favorite, though, was UpTo11, which is easy to use, presents everything in a format that is colorful, detailed, and simple to understand. You can even set the ranking of artists recommended to you from popular to not-well-known, depending on how generic you want your results to be. I also really like Last.FM, whose radio function some of my friends use at work to get varied tunes all day. The music it played in conjunction with my preferences was all really cool, and over time, if I "love" or "reject" enough songs, it will be tailored even more specifically. I have not yet had the program sift through my music files at home, but I think that it would be equally good in that regard. One problem I had was that sometimes the music freezes for a few seconds (on some songs more than others, and I wonder if running the program on a better computer would fix the issue) before resuming, interrupting the flow. Also, as far as I can tell, there's no way to go back and look at the music it's played before. I understand not being able to play past songs again, but just a list would be nice, in case I spaced out and don't remember who was playing, or I would like to tag a previous song as one I liked a lot. I've been having some trouble activating my account with MyStrands, so I can't really say much about it, but it seems like a really neat, collaborative program. As a side note, I really liked staff member Emily's music a lot; it reminded me of Nellie McKay, such great piano and voice, maybe I'll hit her show at Infusion next week!
For the Adventure activity, I visited SpringWidgets, where I found widgets that looked good, but didn't offer much variety. On the other hand, YourMinis offered a lot of different varieties of widgets, but they didn't look as professional, or they made my blog run too slowly because they were so complicated to load. In the end, I settled on having the weather displayed on the bottom left of my page from YourMinis. It's useful information, I could pick the color I wanted it to be, and it looks good. The only problem is that it's a little too long for the sidebar on my blog, so you can't see the weather for that last day of the 5-day forecast, and you also can't access the editing tools for the widget. But, it's okay. If only there was some way to combine the two widget pages, so that there was the variety of YourMinis with the polished look and adaptability of SpringWidgets.
Copyright is a huge issue right now with the internet. I know I used to get a lot of articles ILLed in college when the full text wasn't available online for use in writing papers, so I'm familiar with the librarian copywright scenarios. But with music? Even with the handy example guidelines in the course links, it seems like in some circumstances, there's still a lot of gray area to be considered. When is it okay? Better not to chance it, I guess. But that doesn't stop some of our patrons who check out 30 CDs and return them the next day. You know what they're doing (and maybe even do it yourself). We trespass people for doing it on library computers, but no one can control what you do from home except yourself (and possibly the RIAA police). But that's where DRM comes in, saving you from the trouble of controlling yourself. In some cases, it's better to be too safe (and not even be able to listen to music purchased) than not safe enough (and have yor music poached online) according to big music labels. But Steve Job's open letter exposes some cracks in the veneer, such as DRM only being required on digital music, but not CDs. When it's just as easy to circumvent the whole process by copying a CD instead of buying albums online, why attempt to control one so much more strictly than the other? With Europe being (apparently) the most affected in terms of not even being able to access purchased music, it's a little surprising that the clamor for attention to this hypocrisy hasn't already led to DRM's demise. I understand that there needs to be some kind of watchfulness by producers of content (I'm not quite ready to condone the open source free-for-all plan yet), but obviously DRM is not the way to go. There will always be someone ready to hack any system, but there's got to be some method of ensuring that artists don't go broke (though it seems like the labels are the ones bleeding them dry, not listeners who pirate) without making it so hard just to listen.
In terms of music recommendations, I didn't really like LivePlasma, which I had already looked at for a previous week. I like that it links to the artist's amazon listing, but the format is too busy looking for me, whereas Music-Map was much simpler and easier to see (even if the artists jiggle and overlap a little too much sometimes, making them hard to differentiate). Music-Map is part of GNOD , which has been linked on the "Children and Teens" section of our own website for a long time. My favorite, though, was UpTo11, which is easy to use, presents everything in a format that is colorful, detailed, and simple to understand. You can even set the ranking of artists recommended to you from popular to not-well-known, depending on how generic you want your results to be. I also really like Last.FM, whose radio function some of my friends use at work to get varied tunes all day. The music it played in conjunction with my preferences was all really cool, and over time, if I "love" or "reject" enough songs, it will be tailored even more specifically. I have not yet had the program sift through my music files at home, but I think that it would be equally good in that regard. One problem I had was that sometimes the music freezes for a few seconds (on some songs more than others, and I wonder if running the program on a better computer would fix the issue) before resuming, interrupting the flow. Also, as far as I can tell, there's no way to go back and look at the music it's played before. I understand not being able to play past songs again, but just a list would be nice, in case I spaced out and don't remember who was playing, or I would like to tag a previous song as one I liked a lot. I've been having some trouble activating my account with MyStrands, so I can't really say much about it, but it seems like a really neat, collaborative program. As a side note, I really liked staff member Emily's music a lot; it reminded me of Nellie McKay, such great piano and voice, maybe I'll hit her show at Infusion next week!
For the Adventure activity, I visited SpringWidgets, where I found widgets that looked good, but didn't offer much variety. On the other hand, YourMinis offered a lot of different varieties of widgets, but they didn't look as professional, or they made my blog run too slowly because they were so complicated to load. In the end, I settled on having the weather displayed on the bottom left of my page from YourMinis. It's useful information, I could pick the color I wanted it to be, and it looks good. The only problem is that it's a little too long for the sidebar on my blog, so you can't see the weather for that last day of the 5-day forecast, and you also can't access the editing tools for the widget. But, it's okay. If only there was some way to combine the two widget pages, so that there was the variety of YourMinis with the polished look and adaptability of SpringWidgets.
Monday, June 11, 2007
My pictures on Flickr
If anyone's interested, here are the pictures I took at Main for last week's eXplore activity. I had a lot of fun taking them!
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Week 8 of Learn 2.0
It must be neat to be such a long-time part of a community like Flickr. The people who were meeting for the first time in Hawaii knew each other from their pictures alone, and were so used to the pictures each took that they were even able to do a quiz based on them! Such a close group in cyberspace, it blows my mind the ways that people can find each other from other continents. I am now a member, and I was able to find some really neat pictures (is "The Shifted Librarian" on Flickr the same one who runs the blog, or just someone else who thought the name was cool? Anyway, they had some good OCLS pictures), but I'm not really a photo buff myself, I prefer to see what others take pictures of. It's going to be a little while before I can do the eXplore activity, since I have to wait for my boyfriend to get back from Atlanta so I can use his camera to take pictures at Main.
I had never heard of Creative Commons before, but I can definitely understand that something like it was necessary in this age of increasingly mobile people and ideas. When anyone can find your words and pictures online, it's important to protect them, even if it means just setting boundaries for the ways in which your ideas can be used and shared. And since the Creative Commons website makes it easy to tag and protect your files (the tutorial shows you step by step and it's a very streamlined process), there's no reason not to. Would you want someone else taking credit for your stuff?
I've really enjoyed this course, it's kind of disappointing that it's going to end soon. I look forward to every Tuesday! I haven't been doing this as part of a team, but I have helped several people. Whether it was helping to set up a blog, import a Meez, or add a link list to their Blogger account, I think that I have made a difference in some people's learning. As the weeks wear on, fewer and fewer people have asked for help, which I see as a very good thing! If you take the time to explore a little and experiment, the things that we've approached have not been too difficult. I hope that over the course of this Learn 2.0 voyage, people have become more comfortable and familiar with their own ability to figure things out. But just because we're able to do something on our own doesn't mean that we should be diconnected from those around us, as the Flickr group demonstrated. They didn't just talk to friends and neighbors, but people from all over the world! I hope that this will encourage others to get more involved with the internet and the various new things that are always being created and discovered.
My ProtoPage for the Adventure activity is kind of bland, but it was fun to tool around with it. The setup for the whole thing wasn't very intuitive, so it was a little difficult to figure out how to make it public, and the format isn't exactly what I would want in a webpage, but it's still a cool idea. An easy way for people to create a space for themselves, with their own feeds and widgets that reflect them. Also, you can edit it without having to know any code and change everything around just by dragging it where you want it to be. I have to say, though, I can't figure out how to "tag it with OCLS," as the course page instructed. I looked at everything I thought could help and finally emailed the "feeback" page. If anyone else figures this out before I do, please feel free to share!
I had never heard of Creative Commons before, but I can definitely understand that something like it was necessary in this age of increasingly mobile people and ideas. When anyone can find your words and pictures online, it's important to protect them, even if it means just setting boundaries for the ways in which your ideas can be used and shared. And since the Creative Commons website makes it easy to tag and protect your files (the tutorial shows you step by step and it's a very streamlined process), there's no reason not to. Would you want someone else taking credit for your stuff?
I've really enjoyed this course, it's kind of disappointing that it's going to end soon. I look forward to every Tuesday! I haven't been doing this as part of a team, but I have helped several people. Whether it was helping to set up a blog, import a Meez, or add a link list to their Blogger account, I think that I have made a difference in some people's learning. As the weeks wear on, fewer and fewer people have asked for help, which I see as a very good thing! If you take the time to explore a little and experiment, the things that we've approached have not been too difficult. I hope that over the course of this Learn 2.0 voyage, people have become more comfortable and familiar with their own ability to figure things out. But just because we're able to do something on our own doesn't mean that we should be diconnected from those around us, as the Flickr group demonstrated. They didn't just talk to friends and neighbors, but people from all over the world! I hope that this will encourage others to get more involved with the internet and the various new things that are always being created and discovered.
My ProtoPage for the Adventure activity is kind of bland, but it was fun to tool around with it. The setup for the whole thing wasn't very intuitive, so it was a little difficult to figure out how to make it public, and the format isn't exactly what I would want in a webpage, but it's still a cool idea. An easy way for people to create a space for themselves, with their own feeds and widgets that reflect them. Also, you can edit it without having to know any code and change everything around just by dragging it where you want it to be. I have to say, though, I can't figure out how to "tag it with OCLS," as the course page instructed. I looked at everything I thought could help and finally emailed the "feeback" page. If anyone else figures this out before I do, please feel free to share!
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