Tuesday, January 23, 2007

#23 - Wrap Up

It's been interesting to discover the things that Iw ouldn't have found normally. Things like Rollyo are outside my personal need, and so they aren't things I'd look for normally.

Many of the things in 2.0 have great potential within library services, but I think it's important to not use them simply for the sake of using them. One or two really well built wikis covering various aspects are more impressive and useful than a dozen small chunks of information.

It's also been handy to review applications from a "learner" point of view. Having spent time previously on Flickr and Youtube it's easy to forget not everyone is familier with these sites and services.

overall, a useful and interesting program. I surprised myself more than once!

#22 - Netl...World eBook Fair!

I'm a big fan of the Gutenberg Project as it is - the hours of work going into providing these titles is incredible. The audio versions appear to be as complete and carefully checked as the text versions. I listed to the Little Match Girl (admittedly fearing the worst) and it was as professional a reading as I've heard from any commercial audiobook.

#21 Podcast Tools

I've dabbled in podcasting before when a friend ran his own podcast "station". That was all recorded and edited on my own PC, converted to mp3 and uploaded manually to the website to allow people to access it. It seems we were doing it the hard way! (Maybe we were just trailblazing... yeah... that'd be it...).

One thing I really liked about Podcast.net was the ability to instantly play any cast you liked. I can't see a way to download them onto an mp3 player or hard drive though, unlike Odeo which is flexible enough to allow recording online (good for people who don't like to edit and just want a one shot run - hopeless for me!), playing from the site, embedding into another site (such as the Learning 2.0 blog itself) and downloading in mp3 format. Really really impressive! If I had anything to talk about, then I'd be using ODeo for sure.

#20 YouTube

Behold the 6 second timelapse of me feeding my dogs:

Hehe.

I've been poking around youtube for a while, it's a great time killer and also a good way to catch music clips/comedy. The only trouble with it is the 44% of users who are morons, which is why it's best to avoid the comments section on any video.

#19 Web 2.0 awards list.

I checked out Consumating mostly because I was interested to see what had beaten the ever dreadful MySpace. It looks about a million times more fun than MySpace, a kind of random free for all rather than single profile pages. It's much like Vox attempted, but didn't quite make.

I also looked at Slide - yeat another photo application online. It creates slide shows from your photographs that you can then post to your various blogs and profiles. It has some great effects and makes it easier than animating your own show with flash or something. Not sure about uploading my photos to them though - little bit worrying.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

#18 Online Productivity

Overall, Zoho writer offers much of the functionality of Word - at least the most common and useful tools seem to be available. Images can even be added via upload or link.



It really is much like using word, with the only issue being speed. While text is entering as fast as I'm typing, a few things are taking time to load or work. This is presumably related to internet speed.



As a way of collaborating on documents, Zoho seems like the perfect tool. No emailing back and forth, and groups of people can presumably work on the same file. I say presumably because the other falling down point of Zoho is it is so intuitive the devs apparently thought there'd be no need for help files. The forums are good, but hard ot read through for one piece of info.