Love to hate YouTube

I either love or hate YouTube depending on the day of the week.

The Education pages are useful and there are some really worthy library information videos. But as someone else has noted, it only works if it's done well. We have even been thinking about creating a library information video which could possibly appear on YouTube for prospective students, but finding a moment (or twenty) at this time of year is troublesome.

One thing I don't like about YouTube are the comments. Has anyone ever seen an insighful or instructive comment about one of the videos? I think not. The second thing I don't like about YouTube is all the home videos of people on their soapboxes. Why not blog, so we don't have to look at you too? The third thing...

I won't go on.

Podcasting quietly

 

Podcasting is a fabulous invention. The choice is limited only by your imagination and it's not hard to find high quality material which you can then listen to anywhere. There is the usual amount of dross to wade through, but the BBC, Guardian and other respected news sources are always reliable, in my experience.

I already subscribe to a number of Podcasts, but have added a few more to Google Reader (which I'm taking-to more than iGoogle). I'd prefer to keep all my Podcasts in one spot as I tend to listen to them on my iPod, so would probably prefer to use iTunes than Google.

On a professional level, Podcasting for library information seems a little out of our scope, but I imagine that Podcasts of lectures would be useful and interesting for students. Our Classicists and Modern Linguists might also find Podcasts useful for rote learning - "amo, amas, amat".

As the 23 Things are progressing I find that navigating the different sites is becoming easier and Web 2.0 in general seems to be a little more intuitive and less scary. Progress!