Podcasting and Video

Well, the podcasting thing was interesting. It did give me an excuse to break in the old (or new last Christmas) digital recorder we purchased for converting some analog sound files within the on-going family history endeavor. This was really great, and so easy that I feel like I was allowed to cheat. But in the interest of keeping my one or two readers from lapsing into a coma, I will not share my lovely audio testing. The main thing I wanted to do was check out how podcasting works and whether it would be easy enough to use with our external equipment, and things went fine. I did enjoy the podcasting directories which I had not perused before, so this was another neat find. Finding podcasts easy to use was a challenge. I finally succeeded in adding feeds to my Yahoo account which had a handy player already embedded in the feature. I added Gardening Notes with Carl Elliot found on NPR which had the "My Yahoo" link. Otherwise, if I tried to download the podcast directly as an mp3, the download froze up. As a tool, I wasn't very impressed because it simply acts as a radio broadcast. There are more than one people speaking in radio interview format and even listener questions are taken to answer. The episode I listened to was about bees....and after listening to the most recent post, I was disappointed to find the most recent post was from 2002! I understand the episode was designed to instructional and informative which should have no shelf-life in the gardening sector, but as podcasts are advertised with the "subscribe" feature, the listener is pre-conditioned to expect fairly recent material. Overall, the podcast I listened to was fairly monotone and dry....no flair whatsoever.

This was my favorite of the tasks...I mean, who doesn't love YouTube? From the moment one of my students told me I could watch Gummy Bears for free (back before Disney pulled things like that - of course you can still watch the theme song in Japanese.) I was hooked. I have never downloaded my own video, but I have a huge list of favorites. When searching for libraries or library or books, I expected to run into the same group everyone else had already reviewed, but I still found the variety to be sufficient. An early listing was my quick winner: Mr. Bean at the Library.

As a review, it was horrifying from the archivist standpoint. He starts with writing in the book, then he uses white-out, then he rips out pages, then he cuts out pages, etc. While Mr. Bean is always frustrating to watch, I found this clip to be endearing simply based on his library activities. It makes sense out of all the damaged items I've used in libraries over the years; to realize maybe we just had a few Mr. Beans lurking between the stacks!

Ok, so it's not much of a review since Mr Bean speaks for himself, but here is a small video I couldn't help adding since our March Madness ended so early:

Well, sniff, sniff, on to drown my sorrows in Facebook and MySpace....