Monday, November 1, 2010

Thing #17 - Podcasts

I have to admit, I was never into the whole "podcasting" thing.  I don't own an iPod, so I've never downloaded anything from the iTunes store, which is where a lot of people get their podcasts, I know.  Nor do I have a smartphone, or even a laptop, so I'm hardly able to access podcasts on the go... but, considering how short, sweet, and succinct they can be, it may be interesting to keep a few around, anyway.

I went to podcast.com to learn more about podcasting.  I had to register to access their content, but after some browsing around, I stumbled across Discovery News podcasts.  I've always liked Discovery, as well as Discovery News, and their short and sweet podcasts are really cute.  The most recent one is an (animated) history of Halloween, but they also have specials on breakthroughs in robots and engineering, a longer (3-minute) segment on a pumpkin farmer and aficionado, and a short video on climate change and tigers, to name a few of the videos from the past week.  After subscribing via RSS to MyYahoo! (Bloglines and Google are also options), I should get regular updates from Discovery News on their most recent posts; I have to say, I'm looking forward to it.  Here's a link for the Discovery News podcasts page: http://podcast.com/show/95955/Discovery-News-%28Video%29/

Podcasting could definitely be a good thing for a library, too.  If you can get patrons to subscribe via RSS, you can get news out about events, programs, new materials, and just general library tips and info very quickly and easily.  On the other hand, if a library created a podcasting account, they could subscribe to podcasts from various other sources that the librarians considered useful, helpful, or particularly interesting, so that librarians could share favorite podcasts among themselves and encourage each other to get into watching, listening to, and possibly creating podcasts more, as well. 

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