Week 18: Pod Casts

This week you’ll learn about podcasts – what they are, how to find podcasts to match your interests, and how libraries are using them.

Listen to this week’s podcast and then read the info below. If you have any questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us – we’re happy to help!




What is a podcast?

“Podcasting is a simple means of distributing audio content over the Internet, taking advantage of the power of RSS. Content consumers (end-users) can subscribe to a feed of a producer’s audio content and receive automatic downloads of new content as it is made available online.” (from Podcasting: Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki) The term “podcast” was formed from the words “iPod” and “broadcast,” but you don’t need an iPod to listen to a podcast – any computer or MP3 player will do.

Watch this Common Craft video, “Podcasting in Plain English:”

According to a recent report on eMarketer, it’s estimated the total US podcast audience reached 18.5 million in 2007, and by the year 2009 that number will double.

If that’s the case, libraries might want to think about ways they can use this fast-growing medium to connect with their patrons!

How to find & subscribe to podcasts

There are some easy ways to find podcasts, one of which is simply to check out your favorite web sites to see if they have podcasts available. But you can also check the following sites that gather podcasts by topic or genre, so you can easily find podcasts that match your interests.

• iTunes – not just for Apple users! Requires a download of the free iTunes software.
• podscope
• Podcast Alley
• NPR Podcast Directory
• additional podcast directories can be found on Podseek.net

In case you don’t run across these in your searching, here are some podcasts directed toward library staff which you might find interesting:

• LibVibe : library news
• OPAL Podcasts : Online Programming for All Libraries
• SirsiDynix Institute archived presentations
• Uncontrolled Vocabulary : a live discussion of news, trends, and topics in librarianship

Once you find a podcast to which you’d like to subscribe, just look for a “subscribe” button or link. Copy the feed URL into Bloglines or Google Reader like you did when subscribing to other RSS feeds in Semester 1 of Adventures in Technology and you’re good to go. (If you didn’t participate in Semester 1, you might want to take a look at Week 4: Semester 1’s exercises on RSS & subscribing to feeds.) If you’re an iTunes user, simply click on the “subscribe” button and you’re all set. You’ll see the podcast added to the Podcasts section of your iTunes.

How libraries are using podcasts

Many libraries have started using podcasts to syndicate their programming or to share other info like book or movie reviews. Here are my favorite examples:

• Boulder Public Library: Teen Webcasts
• Denver Public Library Podcasts
• PLCMC’s LibraryLoft Podcasts
• Worthington Libraries: Programs to Go
• Orange County Library System: Podcast and RSS

For more examples, visit Podcasting – Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki.

I found numerous examples of libraries providing audio and video online, but then didn’t provide a way to subscribe to regular offerings via RSS. New York Public Library’s Webcasts, Audio and Video is one example where there is fantastic programming available, but no way to subscribe (as far as I could see). It’s a great start, but they aren’t taking advantage of the push technology available with RSS, and that’s the most important component of podcasting, IMHO.

There’s really no end to how you could use podcasts in a library. How about a 1 minute booktalk every day (or week)? Record a book discussion and post it online for people who want to participate, but couldn’t make the meeting (and pair it with a blog, so that participants can carry on the discussion in another format). Author visits, guest speakers, tour of the library with an embedded PDF map of the building, staff training sessions, original stories for kids… whew! Podcasts provide a great way to be creative at your library.

Some libraries are even setting up podcasting rooms that provide equipment and training for patrons to create their own podcasts at the library. What a great idea!

How to create podcasts

Creating podcasts can be as easy as calling an 800 number and recording your podcast via the phone. This is how the Adventures in Technology team has been creating our podcasts each week. We’ve been using a service called Gabcast which is free and very easy to use. Visit our Gabcast channel and listen to all of the Project Play podcasts or subscribe to get them delivered to you each week.

If you want to do something a little fancier and add music or other sound effects, there’s a bit more involved. That’s beyond the scope of this post, but if you want more info you can visit CNET’s Create Your Own Podcast tutorial. It gives a good, basic intro to what’s required and the steps involved.

When creating your own podcasts, copyright issues need to be considered. You can’t read books for a storytime podcast if the book isn’t in the public domain or if you haven’t received permission from the publisher to do so. You can’t mix in music that isn’t in the public domain either. The good news is that there are sites like CCMixter and Podsafe Music Network that provide music you can use in your podcasts.

Assignment

Subscribe to a podcast in your RSS reader.

• Use one of the podcast directories included above to find a podcast to which you’d like to subscribe.
• When you find a podcast click on the RSS icon or “Subscribe” button for it and copy the feed URL.
• Open your Bloglines or Google Reader and click on “Add” or “Add Subscription.”
• Paste the feed URL you copied into the “blog or feed URL” or “add subscription” box and click “subscribe” or “add.” (Bloglines users will need to click on one more “subscribe” button to complete the process.)

Note to participants who didn’t do Semester 1: If you aren’t familiar with Bloglines or Google Reader, you can either do Week 4: Semester 1’s exercises to learn about them.

Write a post on your blog about your impressions of podcasts and the ways libraries are using them.

Fun Extra

While The Onion’s humor isn’t for everyone, it is definitely one of my favorite podcasts and usually gets a laugh out of me if not even a snort once in a while. How can you resist headlines like, “New Video Game Tied To Rash of Head Explosions,” “Nation Demands Easier Instructions,” and “U.S. Department of Over-Analysis Issues Rambling, Inconclusive Report”? If you’d like to subscribe to their podcast and get your daily dose of humor, here’s the feed: http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/radionews.

Week 14 - Tagging, Social Bookmarking & Del.icio.us

This week you’ll learn about tagging and the social bookmarking web site called del.icio.us (it’s pronounced just like the word “delicious”).

Listen to our podcast for this week and then read the content below. If you have questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us— we’re happy to help!




Tagging

Tagging is a new form of classification used in many Web 2.0 apps, including some you’ve already learned about in previous weeks — blogs, LibraryThing, and Flickr.

You can think of tags as informal labels, used to help organize a collection of resources or to find a specific resource again. When tagging, you can use words, acronyms, numbers, asterisks, or whatever makes sense to you. Tagging gives you the power to tailor and give organizational value to your own online experience, and contribute to the online experience of others.

The concept of tagging may cause discomfort to library staff! Rather than a cataloger assigning Library of Congress or Sears subject headings to a web site, individuals assign subjective, unstructured & free-form keywords and/or phrases. There is no controlled vocabulary or synonym control, and there are no hierarchical relationships in tagging.

In the words of Ellyssa Kroski, “The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done.”

A “tag cloud” is a visual representation of tags used on a specific site or page. In most tag clouds, the more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font, while also displayed in alphabetical order. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

The best way to understand a tag cloud is to see one! Here are a couple of examples:

• All time most popular tags in Flickr
  In this example, you can see that wedding is the most popular tag (look how big it is!)

• The US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
  This interesting site uses tag clouds to represent words used in presidential speeches. Along with big font meaning more mentions, there is also a difference in color to represent when a particular word reached its peak usage in history (so you can see terrorists and Iraq are not only used a lot, but also a recent addition to the presidential speech vocabulary). Use the slider above the cloud to see older speeches.
  
  
• Adventures in Technology
  Even AIT uses a tag cloud in our left hand navigation bar to help you try and better navigate through your adventures!
  
  
• RPL's Most Popular Summer Reading Titles
  

Some libraries are opening their online catalogs, allowing customers to add user-friendly tags to library item records. Melissa L. Rethlefsen says this new trend, “… help[s] librarians bridge the gap between the library’s need to offer authoritative, well-organized information and their patrons’ web experience.” One library offering this feature is the Ann Arbor District Library. In the right-hand column of the catalog’s main screen are dynamically-generated lists of the Top 10 Tags, 10 Most Recent Tags, 10 Random Tags; here’s one example http://www.aadl.org/sopac/tag/time%20travel/ of a record that’s been tagged “time travel”.

del.icio.us

To understand what del.icio.us is, first enjoy this 3-minute video, “Social Bookmarking in Plain English”:

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it’s designed to allow you to store, create and share bookmarks online. It makes your bookmarks personal, portable & sharable. It’s a collection of favorites – yours, mine and everyone else’s.

Each del.icio.us bookmark contains a link, an optional description, and a set of tags. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like, and easily rename or delete them later.

You can even subscribe to the newsfeed for someone’s bookmarks, or just items that have been tagged with a certain keyword.

Here are examples of some ways you can use del.icio.us:

Research – Use del.icio.us to keep track of all the materials you find online. Jill keeps tracks of websites that she's discovered that she thinks look interesting; you can peek at her del.icio.us bookmarks here: http://delicious.com/hansje/bundle:Adventures%20in%20Technology

Wishlist – Instead of creating an Amazon wishlist, use the tag “wishlist” for the items you’d like to receive, and then share your wishlist by giving a link to http://del.icio.us/username/wishlist

Cookbook – When you find a great recipe on a website, save it to del.icio.us. Tag it with the recipe’s ingredients, method or style of cooking (grill, Chinese, etc.) and when you need ideas for what to make for dinner, you can use your del.icio.us bookmarks to find those recipes you saved.

Collaboration – Friends, coworkers, and other groups can use a shared account, special tag, or their del.icio.us networks to collect and organize bookmarks that are relevant and useful to the entire group. As an example, here’s the del.icio.us bookmarks http://del.icio.us/haveuheard/ that I & three colleagues used as a workspace to collaborate on a WAPL 2007 conference program; we tagged items with asterisks to indicate which ones each person felt were most important to cover during the presentation, and it worked really slick.

Here are examples of ways libraries are using del.icio.us for their patrons:
• Seminole County Library http://del.icio.us/SeminoleCountyLibrary
• Menasha Public Library Recommended Websites http://del.icio.us/MenashaLibrary (note the “bundling” of tags by topic)
• San Mateo Public Library (tags are bundled together by Dewey Decimal number) http://del.icio.us/SanMateoLibrary
• Nashville Public Library Teen Web Links (note the use of a tag cloud) http://www.library.nashville.org/teens/teenweb.asp

Tagging your blog postings
So, at the beginning of this lesson, we mentioned that blogs use tags. You can use tags for your blog postings on Blogger, if you’d like. In Blogger, they call tags may also be called “labels”.

When you’re adding a new post, just add some subject words (separated by commas) to the labels box at the bottom of the post. It’s that easy! You’ll see the labels appear at the bottom of the post.

If you’d like to add tags (aka labels) to posts you’ve already written, it’s easy to do that, too:
1. After you’ve logged into Blogger, click “Posts” to manage your posts.
2. Click “Edit” next to any post you want to add labels to.
3. Add your labels.
4. Click “Publish Posts”
Not so bad, right?

You can also display your labels in the sidebar of your blog, so people can click on a label and see all of the posts with that label. You do this with Blogger’s “Layout” feature. If you’ve already added a blogroll or picture or other things to your blog, you know how to do this already. Just choose to add “Labels”. If you haven’t done this before, and you’re interested in doing it, check out the step-by-step instructions from Blogger.

Assignments

1. Write a post in your blog about this week’s lesson and add some tags/labels to the post. Some questions to consider: How can libraries harness the “massive amounts of participation” in tools like del.icio.us? Where else could libraries use tags? Is the concept of tagging, with its uncontrolled vocabulary, unsettling to you?

2. Explore del.icio.us: Search for something you’re interested in. Try clicking on different things in an entry to see what happens (What happens when you click on the title of the bookmarked page? How about the tags? How about the “saved by xxx people” link?)

Optional assignments:

1. Set up your own del.icio.us account and share its URL on your blog. Del.icio.us has a How do I get started? page to get you started!

2. Choose someone’s account in del.icio.us who is linking to things you particularly like, and subscribe to their RSS feed in your Google Reader account. (HINT: Once you get to their del.icio.us page, look for the orange RSS icon at the bottom of the page!). If you can’t find someone’s account to subscribe to, try Libraryman.

3. If you really like del.icio.us, set up the del.icio.us bookmarklet in your browser. This allows you to add new websites to your del.icio.us collection. You just go about your business on the Web until you find a website you want to visit again, then click the bookmarklet on your Web browser. del.icio.us will then automatically open a window that lets you write any notes you want to save about the website, as well as “tag” it with keywords.

Week 4: RSS & Newsreaders

RSS and Newsreaders

Last week you started your own blog. This week you’ll learn about the RSS feeds that are automatically created by your blog & other blogs, as well as by other types of content.

You’ll learn:

• What RSS is and why you might want to use it
• How to use a newsreader to subscribe to RSS feeds
• How to know when an RSS feed is available
  

Listen to our fourth podcast and read the content below. If you have questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us. We’re happy to help!




What is RSS?

The initials RSS stand for “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is a format for syndicating & publishing content online through newsfeeds. An RSS feed is updated as soon as the original content is updated.

RSS is revolutionizing the way content creators share information, and changing the way people consume information. It’s an efficient (and free) way to stay informed on topics that interest you.

Enjoy this video which explains RSS in Plain English:

What’s a newsreader, and why do I want one?

A newsreader is software that lets you subscribe to and read RSS feeds. With RSS feeds & a newsreader:

• Updates come to you, instead of you seeking them
• You tailor the news to fit your needs
• News is gathered in one place
• You can review lots of content in a short time
• It’s easy to scan headlines & read posts

How do I find library newsfeeds to which I can subscribe?

We’ve recommended some library feeds below. You can preview them & choose the ones to which you'd like to subscribe.

• Adventures in Technology
  
• ALA Techsource Blog
• blyberg.net
• David Lee King
• Information Wants to Be Free
• Jessica's Reviews
• LibrarianInBlack
• Library Stuff
• Lifehacker
  
• MakeUseOf.com
• RPL's Emerging Technology's Team Del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Racine Public Library News, Events & Information
• The Shifted Librarian
  
• Stephen's Lighthouse
• Tame the Web
• The WLA Blog
• Web2.0 Tools, WebServices, Mobile Apps

But wait – there’s more! You can find RSS feeds at lots of web content besides blogs:

• WorldCat user-created lists
• EBSCOhost alerts. Log in to your account to “create topic search alerts & journal alerts”: http://support.epnet.com/support_news/detail.php?id=334&t=r&page=&private=true (Note: EBSCOhost is available to Wisconsin libraries through Badgerlink)
• Tags used on the del.icio.us social bookmarking service and Flickr
• Podcasts like Uncontrolled Vocabulary
• Newspapers like the New York Times & the Journal Times
  

A good way to tell if web content has an RSS feed is when you see a small (often orange) RSS icon on a page or in your web browser’s address bar (see some examples).

What other ways can I use RSS feeds?

You can display RSS feeds on your blog or web page to provide content that’s automatically & frequently updated. These feeds can be from one of your library’s blogs, or from an outside source like newspaper headlines. Or they could be del.icio.us tags used to collect & update content on a subject guide web page.

Some free RSS display generators you can try include Feed to JavaScript, Feed Digest, RSS Mixer, and RSS-to-Javascript.

Here are examples of some of the ways libraries are re-purposing RSS feeds on their web sites:

• Denver Public Library There’s a live news feed on the right-hand side of the page; feeds are from Reuters, NY Times and other news sources
• Homer Township Public Library District (uses Feed2JavaScript) The library’s home page displays the headlines of library blogs & news sources in the center column. Sources of the newsfeeds are Library News & Announcements, the Director’s Blog, Teen Events, and local news via Google News
• MIT Libraries This page uses the RSS feed generated by the library’s del.icio.us list to populate their Virtual Reference Collection

Find more ideas for using newsfeeds at the RSS4Lib blog.

Assignment:

You’re going to set up a free Google Reader account and subscribe to at least 10 newsfeeds.

Tasks:

1. Register for a free account at Google Reader. After visiting www.google.com/reader scroll down and click on "Create an Account" on the bottom right hand side of the page. You can register for an account using your racinelibrary.info email address.

• This tutorial walks you through how to set up a Google Reader account. This tutorial will show you how to subscribe to newsfeeds.
  
• If you prefer, watch this video that demonstrates the steps.

2. Subscribe to at least 10 newsfeeds. Here are some for starters:

• Preview & choose from a core collection of library & technology related blogs we’ve put together for you here.
• Pick from a collection of library blogs at the Blogging Libraries Wiki
• Find more than just library blogs: http://www.bloglines.com/subbundles

3. Create a post on your blog about this assignment. Ideas for what you can write about: What do you like or about RSS feeds and aggregators? How do you think you might be able to use this in your work or personal life?

Optional task for those who already use Google Reader:

• try Bloglines
• set up a RSS feed for a website that doesn't already have a feed using the site Page2RSS
  

Extra: Cute Overload

Every week on Adventures in Technol we give you a little extra something fun; this week it’s Cute Overload!

Winner of the Webby’s 2007 People’s Voice Award and the 2007 Bloggies award for Best American Weblog, Cute Overload is guaranteed to give you a daily dose (or overdose) of “prosh” critters, from aardvarks to zebra finches. News flash: Cute Overload now proven beneficial to your health!

“A thing, accompanied by a smaller version of that thing, is always cute” and “You’re cute if your furniture doubles as a meal’ are just two of Cute Overload “35 Rules of Cuteness”.

Subscribe to the Cute Overload RSS newsfeed using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/CuteOverload.