Podcasting

Have just looked at the podcasting inducation video "Podcasting in plain English". I have learned what POD in PODCASTING stands for: "personal on demand" (versus BROADCASTING).
I have created an RSS subfolder in Google Reader entitled "Podcasts", to tell the difference between other RSS feeds and Podcasts.

BBC podcasts

• Gardener's Question Time (radio program)
  [very easy to use, clear, beautiful]

University of Oxford

• music from Merton College Chapel (music only)
  [when fiddling around I started playing several podcasts simultaneously, which meant that the music got overlayed - very weird]

Podcast.com

• 2 American belly-dancers in Bangalore (Video story with soundtrack)

Podcast Alley

• I looked for a podcast on pottery, with video images. I found "Pottery Pod", a collection of practical hands-on podcasts by American potters. Some of the recording are a bit low-tech and I couldn't always understand the rambling voice track. Some videos were terribly slow to download and look at (by default with "QuickTime"). I wonder if one needs some special podcast downloading software? Some link on "Podcast Alley" calls it a "Podcast Aggregator".
  What is a "Podcast aggregator", I wonder?

Networking, Network Explorer

Have now also added Angela Carritt's Delicious entry to my Network on Delicious.
By clicking around and looking at AC's network, I can see that one can create endless rings and roundabouts, by linking and by adding little Flags indicating that one is a Fan. Two little flags indicate that the fanship is Mutual.

Have added Lucile Desligneres to my Network on Delicious as well.

When I clicked on Delicious Network Explorer in order to view my network, I get the error message
"Error, can't establish connection to fetch data". Why is that?
It should show at least 3 entries on my Delicious network (Philosophy Library, Angela Carritt, Lucile Deslignieres).

Puzzled.

I have also noticed that when I apply Labels to my blog postings, I get controlled vocabulary now.
Is there a way I can suppress this feature, so that I can type in any tagging term that I fancy?

Networking / Delicious

Have now added the Delicious bookmarks of the Philosophy library, which I found listed in the OULS Web 2.0 Directory to my Network on Delicious.

Bookmarks on Delicious

Ploughing on:

• have signed up to Delicious (using my Yahoo login details)
• have uploaded my bookmarks from Firefox to Delicious, something I had meant to do for ages
  [uploading was very fast, for more than 1000 bookmarks]
• have decided to keep most of my bookmarks "private" until I improve the tagging
  [I need to get used to the new structure of my bookmark collection. I had them organized in directories, by subject, and got so used to it. Now I can display them by date, or alphabetically, or by tags - a whole new world]
• have made a few bookmarks "public"
• have improved the tagging on those public bookmarks
  [I find it irritating that tags can only be one word long. What does one do with compound names?
  Hyphenation doesn't work, I have tried that. Have used "_" instead, but that's not satisfactory.
• have added the tag "ox23" to all my public bookmarks, so that they get picked up by other Delicious users who search by tag "ox23"

Photo editing

I have quickly looked at FotoFlexer and Pixer.us but without trying them out and comparing their functionality to that of Picnic. It's just too much, I can hardly keep up with the wretched 23Things as it is.

No need to download Picasa 3.1, got that already on my computer.
Picase forever puzzles me, because I never quite know when I am sorting my photographs "virtually", and when I am creating new folders (i.e. actual subdirectories on my harddisk).

New stone carving, Old Library, awaiting installation

New stone carving, Old Library, awaiting installation,
originally uploaded by Wolvercote snapper.

This is the same photograph, after I have tinkered with it in "Picnic".

I am "blogging" this photo straight from Flickr.

Gee, I can use a lot of Web 2.0 slang now. Scary.

Note: the post was created from Flickr, but I went in afterwards, in order to add tags.

"Life is no picnic" (anon., 7th cent.)

I will tinker with this photograph in "Picnic":

Without really understanding what I was doing, I have also set up a template for posting directly from Flickr to my blog.

All this interconnectedness starts to get on my nerves. It's like going around in circles, everything is looped up with everything else. Too much information.

I find that the Mozilla Firefox browser isn't good for any of this blogging business. Only in Internet Explorer can I see the actual photographs I am uploading. Why is that? Does anybody know?
Knock, knock, anybody there?

Flickr

I didn't need to set up a Yahoo account because I already have a Yahoo email account.
Have joined Flickr (Thing 7) and chosen a "Flickr-identity", and have uploaded a number of photographs taken in 2006 and 2007.

The photographs I have uploaded document skilled restoration work that took place in my College's famous Canterbury Quad - stonemasonry repairs and repainting of decorated lead guttering. Over several weeks in 2006 and 2007, I took photographs documenting the works. I even climbed onto the scaffolding to take close-up shots. Here is my favourite stone carving: bear mother with cub, covered in dust.

RSS feeds - explore further

Am playing around with RSS feeds, to see what I can do with them.
I quite like the way that tags display on the right-hand margin:

I have created folders for my RSS feeds by subject, which makes sense (Creative, Library work, News). 

I have marked an item with a "star" as a favorite.

But I am not sure that I want to "share" or "publish" my collection of RSS feeds. This whole self-promoting, slightly exhibitionist side of Web 2.0 / social networking sits uncomfortable with me. This probably outs me as an "analogue native".

Coming to think of it - I was 24 when I first used a personal computer. It was in Library School in Jerusalem in 1987. A whole classroom full of IBM PCs, screens displaying green text on a black background, and big floppy disks in paper envelopes. I took to emailing like a fish to water, used to exchange emails almost daily with a cousin who was working at the University in Oxford at the time. Only university people were using email in those days.




 

Trying to keep up with "Things", run, run, run

Monday morning - need to get on with my 23 Things, I am 2 weeks behind schedule, ouff!
Just signed up for Google Reader and subscribed to the RSS feed for 23 Things, and a bundle of "News" feeds. I don't really like RSS news feeds, because they show sensationalist headlines only. Reading a real newspaper is what I like, where I can dip in and out of articles at leisure.

Now signed up to 5 more RSS feeds:

• Victoria and Albert Museum, press releases
• Manchester City Gallery
• James at OIL [23Things Oxford]
• I want to [Phil Bradley, library related]
• 23Things Oxford

When saving this post, I got notified that one cannot use the "ampersand" sign (in posts and in post labels).
That's why I wrote "Victoria and Albert Museum", rather than "Vee ampersand Ay" [if you see my point].
Odd