The end of the world as we know it! No, just a break to return to the everyday... while using (at least some of) the nifty things we've had to have a go at in the "Learning 23 Things" program.My favs - del.icio.us, ZohoWriter, and LibraryThing; yes..., and Flickr plus YouTube - but only for the fun stuff that I have no time to look for anyway ;). Already had things like BlogLines on the go from some time back plus being in the midst of the set-up of a new work wiki ... but always more to see and learn out there !Did enjoy having a go at the various other things but I can see myself making more use of these beasties. The impetus of a 'have to do' course always a boost to trying to squeeze in that bit more professional development work in the oodles of free time that we have -not - but it was fun (at times) [insert here mental image of classic old email graphic "duck smashing keyboard" ] - as the technology can still let us down too often.And my parting graphics (at least for now) - if the layout gremlins have departed...
As a dedicated follower of paper, I have yet to play much with e-books. Not my preferred way to read but definitely one (just one, not the!) way of the future.Look at NetLibrary, OCLC's contribution to the listened-word. A huge site, user friendly to search and certainly a way to go when you want your books to come in your ears rather than your eyes.For a bit of added reading, I came across this site The Institute for the Future of the Book - some interesting articles and comments in the blog.
And now, yet more stuff to be looking for out there! And... oh dear... I remain podless so this is just from an observer's view - if I'm going to blast my little eardrums whilst travelling - give me the (much better!) sound quality of a CD anytime!As if there was not enough to look at at any given time, you can use vod/vid/pod-casts to see/hear what you missed! (is nowhere safe ?!?!?) or inflict your ideas of a good pod on others!As you may have surmised from previous entries, I'm a bit of a fan of "my ABC" and you can find alot of podded goodies at their website here - from comedy and recipes to news and interviews. And, naturally, you can use your other web 2.0 tools, to keep up, eg. use RSS to get updates when your favourite podcast is updated!To go hunting to find out about/find/create podcasts, Mashable's Podcasting ToolBox is a large place to start! Just a couple from their list that look promising: PodcastDirectory.com or Grepr (which goes the social networking way to build you a profile of your pod-interests).
Video content, amongst everything else, is out there and growing at exponential rates. Too much of it is 'WHY did they bother??' and 'eeewwww!!!' - so little (comparatively) rates an 'oh, that's interesting and useful!' (and yes, there is a fair bit of 'LOL' stuff - but how much time does anyone have...????)Well, the biggy is, of course, YouTube, - the one we get to hear about on the news almost every night when either someone has put something awful or illicit up or we have aging politicians (who have to ask their adult children how much a litre of milk costs for real people to buy) thinking that they are getting in touch with Gen neXt by putting party politicals on the web. Cynical - me - never! but there is some good stuff to be found. And for a couple of interesting ones... look up !!
Easy way to have a browse around web 2.0 sites is to use Movers 2.0's Top Web 2.0 Sites list. Already looked at a few in previous blogs... but there's always room for a few more ! - more file sharing through Box.net, offer your identity for theft by the nasties out there via FaceBook or MySpace, tag yet more interesting stuff using digg, compile your music playlist on imeem, find a webpage/article on anything sensible or bizarre on Squidoo, find yet more blogs or forums using topix and more wikis via wikia ... and so on, seemingly ad infinitum (and ad nauseum). So much web, so very little time... and still so much dross to avoid whilst trying to find (or chance upon) the gems.
More cool toys! Apps in the ether! Enjoyed these - Zoho's Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet - create docs or other files 'out there', and easily grab them back or share them. Yes, I know, doesn't sound that exciting but when you have steam driven technology at home and an outside-world unfriendly main system, being able to carry (not literally) a few files around is definitely a plus. And then there's the ease of use - all the nice goodies on the toolbars - be it the ever popular emoticons, images, 2 click access to special characters and easy file formatting options. (Having found that I could actually get into ZohoWriter from my work desktop, I proceeded to be a good 'Learning 23 Things' cub and do this blog entry from there. Needless to save after getting it nicely underway, I got a 'dialog box of death', so it was back to a standalone PC - when I could get at one!) There are, of course, various others out there such as ajaxWrite or if you want familiar options, and like using the web-company-that-ate-the-world, Google docs & spreadsheets is out there too.
