Thing 42 - Music

This one is really fun! I mostly work alone in a windowless office surrounded by loads of computer equipment, and therefore am usually playing some music, either through my computer or on a CD player. But eventually you get tired of hearing the same tracks repeatedly. This is where Internet radio is so handy. I signed up for Last.fm, downloaded the app for Mac and let it draw on my iTunes library to create a station of music I'd like. And it's pretty good! Lots of people I haven't heard of but whose music I do like. The listings also indicate similar artists (so I can see what they're basing the choice on) so I can explore further if I want.

The one problem here is that we've been asked (well, all right - told) not to do streaming radio at work because of the bandwidth demands. So I probably can't use this a lot at work. I'll have to see if my connection at home is fast enough.

I also played around a bit with Pandora, which is also very cool. The only problem I found was that the first two search terms I put in in Pandora returned no results. It's been great to have something different to listen to in my office. 

As you can see, I added the Last.fm widget, both here and in the sidebar.

Last.fm, at least, does not seem much like "radio" to me. Well, maybe it's more like MPR than regular commercial radio. When I listen to commercial radio, sometimes it's partly for the local stuff - news, weather, ads, etc. You don't get that with Internet music services. Even the Internet weather, it seems, is not updated as quickly as local radio can give updates.

Thing 41 - Life as a mashup

I signed up for Lifestream. The thing that I found most surprising is the HUGE number of sites it supports. I thought we were seeing lots of sites during this whole Thing process (and we are!) but there are so, so, so many more out there! To say I'd never heard of most of the supported sites should be expected. (And there are some that sound familiar, so I've probably looked at them during the Things and just can't remember them.) 

It's a great idea, to be able to pull all your accounts into one spot. Practically, though, I probably don't use enough of them on an ongoing basis to make this as useful or necessary as some find it. I'll follow it for a while, though, and see.

I added a Lifestream badge to the sidebar. And I found another Minnesota 23 (or 46) Things person to follow.

Thing 40 - Mashups

Wheel of Food is just fun to do! It made me laugh out loud. And the Flickr Memory Game was very fun. Bubblr too.

Here, I tried Bubblr again, with more photos.

I'd forgotten about BigHugeLabs (the trading cards from the first 23 were so cool...). It was fun to play around with those apps again.

The Mashup Awards website lists some fun things - track what's being talked about the most on Twitter, match your Twitter posts with Flickr photos, get a 10-day forecast for cities around the world...

I am continually amazed by the creativity and resourcefulness of the people developing all these tools. Real-world applications aren't leaping out at me right now, but I'll keep thinking about how we could use them.

Back to Thing 37 - Just a comment

I've done most of these Things at work, but because of the problems with the scrapbooking tools, I was working from my computer at home, and I found that one of the two Animoto slideshows is now visible! And I still don't have a gmail account! I don't think I could see it at work earlier. How weird. And if one is visible, why wouldn't the other one be too? Computers really do have minds of their own.

Thing 39 - Digital Storytelling

What could be better - scrapbooking *and* computers?? These tools were lots of fun, and I want to play with them more, both at home and at work. For the page creation, I tried both Scrapblog and Smilebox. With Scrapblog, it wanted me to purchase anything I wanted to use on a page (which I didn't want to do). With Smilebox, I wanted to create just one page, but the template required me to do four (which of course took more time). It's nice to be able to use video in the pages, though, and to add music.

Uploading the file from Smilebox did not go smoothly. The application kept quitting, and then it was unclear as to whether it was actually uploading the file or not.  So I tried it from home, and didn't even get that far. The application would download but not open - kept crashing.

So back I went to Scrapblog and finally found some things I could use without buying them. The page is the post above.

I liked both of these tools, but there are some drawbacks - the fact that I couldn't actually upload the Smilebox set is the biggest one, of course. I'll try it from work again tomorrow and see if the problem has been resolved or if their tech support has any suggestions. I think digital scrapbooking would be really nice to implement on my library website, but it may take a while to get going.

Thing 38 - Screencasting

This is very cool. I can foresee load of library applications for this! I tried several apps - Jing, Skitch, Screencast-o-matic (who wouldn't love the name!) - and I think they all will be useful in various ways.

The screencast I made, using Screencast-o-matic, was on how to renew library materials online. This is something I will use on our website, but will probably re-do it and add some more details. The info in the training screencast on how to embed something into a blog or website doesn't work, however. There isn't an option for getting the widget and an embed code. So I'm not sure how this is going to go....

Worked! I'm really excited about the opportunities here.