YouTube

I've used YouTube before to search for videos of random things; it's great for that. For instance, a book I was reading featured several country dances so I used YouTube to find out what they looked like. It does, however, have an awful lot of dross on it, and so I don't use it regularly. It can definitely be used in the library world; I particularly like the idea of seeing demonstrations of using resources on it. I find that seeing someone do something can be easier than reading instructions without pictures so videos would be great if well-publicised.

Podcasts

Podcasts are all new to me. I've used the BBC's listen again service quite a bit to catch up on radio shows but never subscribed to a feed. I found their website really easy to use and so Radio 4's Friday night comedy and 5 Live's Fighting Talk will be making their way to my Google Reader. I didn't realise such a thing was possible. It might encourage me to listen to them more regularly - I just need to find the time!

Social bookmarks

Delicious is another resource that I've been using for over a year. I was drawn towards it because I wanted to escape the rigidity of a favourites list, which is tied to one machine and is very structured in its filing. I do have most websites I use occasionally on it, and it works well; I particularly like being able to add several tags for websites which don't fit into a neat category.

However, I don't use it on a daily basis. The work-related websites I visit a lot are in my favourites and that works better for me than having to sign in to Delicious. At home I use Firefox and so I just need to begin typing a website's name for the URL to appear and again, that's easier than signing in to Delicious. It's the occasional and niche websites where it works for me.

I haven't investigated networks before; I use Delicious and its tags as a convenient storage place for bookmarks rather than for discovery. I can see how it's useful for libraries to have lists of recommended websites for users that are in one place and I really like the flexibility of tagging of them.

Photos and images

I've never experimented with uploading photos or editing them though this week's things were both new. It was very simple to upload photos to Flickr, though adding more information about them was harder; adding geotags for instance didn't seem as intuitive as it could have been. It took me a while to figure it out. I liked Picnik a lot and quickly produced a rather nice collage of photos taken from the Knoydart peninsula in Scotland:

I can definitely see myself returning to this in the future.

Google Reader

I've been using Google Reader for about a year after being inspired to do so by others on my distance learning course and I think it helps me keep in touch with developments in the library world. I've signed up to follow about 10 different blogs, ranging from Bob McKee's (CILIP's chief executive) to A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette.