Week 9, Thing 21 Podcasts

My first stop was the Yahoo tutorial. It made working with podcasts sound less scary. I almost downloaded the Yahoo Music engine, but my daughter told me that she had never need to download software to listen to podcasts. It turns out that the Windows Media Player already on the computer worked just fine. Having not a lot of time to waste on junk, I went straight to Educational Podcast Directory. The site is very basic. I clicked on Information Skills. There I managed to still waste time by looking at entries for baby names and polymer clay, before following the Open Stacks link to find that its subtitle was Promoting information access and literacy for all. There I hit the jackpot with “Uncontrolled Vocabulary,” a podcast series (podseries?) on current topics in libraries as suggested by blogs and articles in the news. I am listening to edition #9 right now. The topics are interesting and one of the participants authored the article We Asked for 2.0 Libraries and We Got 2.0 Librarians, which I had read for an earlier Thing. Another thing I liked about Uncontrolled Vocabulary was that the blog that the podcast is attached to gave a link list to the articles that were being discussed. Anyone interested in submitting a blogpost or news article for inclusion in future podcasts can send the link to del.icio.us with the tag unvocab, which is an interesting use of social bookmarking. Adding the feed to my Bloglines feeds was simple. I guess I will need to invest in an MP3 player next, because this would be good for listening to on my commute.