Multimedia Madness

I worked through the ninth (and final) week of tools. A lot of cool stuff here. I'm as big a YouTube user as anybody, so it was neat to take a look at other web video providers I otherwise might have ingnored. Especially intriguing to me is VideoJug, which provides a selection of "how-to" videos on a variety of subjects. The videos are of good quality and the site is easily navigable. I much prefer it to YouTube's largely clunky and confusing search mechanism. Also, it should be noted that the one major application missing from this section is the free screen-capture product Jing, an extremely useful tool for making and sharing videos of your computer's desktop. It would be a natural fit here.
I've never been one much for podcasting as a user. On the rare occasions that I've listened to them, I got them through iTunes on my computer. Still, I appreciated learning about other podcast serices available, especially Podomatic, which provides one-stop shopping for creating, distributing, and finding podcasts. It's kind of a ham radio club for podcasters.
Finally, the NetLibrary was cool to try out as well. I had used this before mainly to find electronic text books, not audiobooks, but it's nice to know it can be used to get audio as well. Unfortunately, I couldn't try it out because I only have an iPod :(.
All in all, while all of these multimedia tools might be useful for us and our patrons, there is really only one ultimate reason to use the internet for audio and video. This.

2.0 Tool Overload!!! Danger Will Robinson!!!

The week 8 collection of online productivity tools was fun to go through at first, but soon started to fry my brain. Yes, there are a lot of great tools here.
There are things I already use like Cute PDF Writer and the Google suite of products, along with a whole bunch of tools new to me that can be used to make lists, mind maps, sticky notes, and more more MORE!!!! There are so many tools available to be productive that you'll end up falling behind in your productivity just trying them all out (I know I did :-) )
I think the one that impressed me the most was Zoho. The 23 Things page directs you to their project suite, which isn't free, but they also have a whole suite of free online productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet etc.) that is as useful as MS Office.
Overall, I thought the value of knowing about all these tools was not so much for my own personal use, but rather to be able to show and recommend these tools to patrons. They can be especially beneficial to people whose income precludes them from shelling out a few hundred bucks for Microsoft's software package. These tools are innovative, powerful, and best of all, cheap!