Screencast Software

I've been playing around with screencast software today. I have Jing's free version installed on my computer and I just installed a trial version of Camtasia for mac. Here is a screencast I did for my 451 class, demonstrating how a project about folk music could be searched using the Music Index Online database.

Aptitude

First, I've found that I really like the New York Times' Tech section. It's one of my favorite news sources since I've bookmarked it. Today I read an article about how iPhone "Apps" are changing not only the evolution of smart phones, but also the development and distribution of games.

The popularity of Apple’s app model has reached a fever pitch. Tens of thousands of independent developers are clamoring to write programs for it, and the App Store’s virtual shelves are stocked with more than 100,000 applications. Apple recently said that consumers had downloaded more than two billion applications from its store.

The full article is here.

Podcast Watch

Listening to the podcast On the Media, which is out of WNYC, the public radio station of New York City, would probably be a good bet each week, because their topics often merge with topics related to librarianship. However, sometimes they hit librarianship more directly, as they did on their past show: The Past, Present, and Future of Books.

Website of the Day

Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish is one of my favorite news sources. His readers regularly send in photos taken from windows and these photos are shared on the blog with the heading, The View From Your Window with the location and time listed below the photo. Now The Atlantic (which Andrew Sullivan works for) has collected a portion of these photos into a book. Sullivan provided a link to blurb.com, where you can create your own books. You can also page through books like you would a physical book. It's the first time I've ever been to the website, and it's pretty cool. For a sample, here's a link to the Atlantic book The View From Your Window.

Continuing Evidence

...that the eReader is not a fad: Barnes & Nobles' Nook has sold out. Really, it shows a problem with production and distribution, but eReaders are desirable gifts. The Kindle is only about two years old, and there's already a swell in competition and attention. It's not changing the culture as fast as the iPod, but it's changing things.

Word-of-Mouth

People have been sharing hilarious bits of viral culture with me lately, showing how the Internet helps word-of-mouth campaigns and vice versa. YouTube has played a prominent role, as has Amazon, two titans of 2.0. People will often ask: "Where did you find out about this?" and I say, "People told me about it," just like I told them. Every bit (especially the oozinator and the shake weight) has elicited tearful laughter or stress relief. That doesn't go unshared.








Check out how many reviews this t-shirt has.

Website of the Day

In class today we talked about the advantages of presenting a single box search to users over the multiple boxes of most library search engines. Dartmouth college has adopted the single box search using Summon. I don't entirely understand how to describe it, so I think you should just take a look for yourself.