Discovery Exercises - Podcasts, RSS Feeds and I-Google

Podcasts

Here's a couple of podcasts I subscribe to. First, there's Gateworld, pretty much the best site for all Stargate news and discussion and coincidentally my favourite show since when I was about ten. They cover a lot of interesting topics from interviews to episode breakdowns

http://www.gateworld.net/podcast/itunes_podcast_rss.xml


IGN is a well reputed general entertainment site and their podcasts cover a range of topics from movies to video games

http://feeds.ign.com/ignfeeds/podcasts/games/

Here also is the National Library of Australia podcasts which I found after a couple of Google searches.

http://www.nla.gov.au/podcasts/feeds/talks.xml

Library podcasts are useful for people involved in the industry to listen to professionals discussing their views and commenting on the latest developments. They are easily accessible and being only 1 - 10 minutes in length won't take too long to load. These snippets can prove invaluable in the library industry, which is always changing.


RSS Feeds and Google Reader

To be honest, I never really noticed RSS feeds until I started this exercise. At first I found it kind of confusing, but when I started using Google Reader and adding RSS feeds to it, I saw the advantages of having the information come to me. In my personal life I would be able to keep up with the latest entertainment news and whatnot and in my work I would be able to keep up with the latest developments in my industry. Libraries can take advantage of this technology by sending out the latest news and events,  author interviews and book reviews.

I-Google

I was surprised at what I-Google could do when I first created my account. Joining my gmail, YouTube and Google Reader accounts to the page was great (although it took me quite a while to figure out how) and would save me the bother of accessing them on their own. It was like a one stop webpage. Plus there were plenty of widgets to add including daily Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield comic strips which was a nice bonus.

A Couple of Discovery Exercises

Discovery Exercise - Embedding a YouTube Video

It was actually pretty easy to put a YouTube video into my blog. I found this classic Simpsons clip on YouTube, copied the URL, then posted it in the 'Insert a Video' option in my post. Done and done.

Discovery Exercise - Social Bookmarking - Delicious and Library Thing

I admit that I spent most of my time with Library Thing, since I'm an avid book lover and have a ton of books at home that are in desperate need of cataloguing (as well as shelf space). I found it a pretty useful tool to keep track of all my books (mostly fantasy), as well as finding recommendations for other similiar themed books and authors. There were also reviews, groups and discussions going on and a whole range of authors that use Library Thing for their own reading which I found pretty interesting.

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

Delicious seemed to be a pretty useful site for bookmarking useful websites and adding tags to categorise and organise them. I didn't spend that much time with it, but from what I explored it seemed that this would be a useful tool for sharing links with other people and seeing how they have tagged similiar links, building a kind of online social network.