21 - Podcasts, Smodcasts!

About 6 months ago every second person coming into Brighton Library to use the computers was asking about podcasts, how to download them and how to copy them on to their mp3 players. Bit of a nightmare really trying to explain that you couldn't save them to your ipod because you were not the owner of the itunes software installed on the computer. People just didn't get it, the owned an ipod so why couldn't they get their podcast onto the ipod? Not that easy to explain.

I noticed in this excercise that the 3 directories for locating podcasts are all American, can't help but think this is not relevant to me. Although it does show me where I can find podcasts on certain topics.

The yahoopodcasts, podcast.net and podcast alley sites are very user friendly and you can listen to podcasts immediately and also subscribe to future podcasts in the series.

I did a google search for Australian podcast directories and was happy to see there are alot of hits. So I decided to check out this site
http://www.podcastdirectory.com.au/

So the first 2 I chose to listen to were again American,trying not to get disheartened I clicked on the category Australia and got 8 podcasts including Channel 9 and jtv. Not really good enough for an Australian podcsat directory.

I haven't found a podcast that I am interested in enough to post on my site. I guess you can tell that I am not a huge podcast fan, I am more of a visual person, and like to look at the whole picture not just listen to learn. But that's just me, I prefer to read the information myself.

Anyway I may have lost site of what this exercise was actually about, so gonna finish up now.

Step 19 - Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I checked out a site called "43 Things"
http://www.43things.com/about/view/learn_more

Cool concept, "43 Things"is a site that encourages you to record and share 43 goals/aspirations with the rest of the world, no matter how trivial or unattainable. In general, vague goals are the most popular goals on 43 things. I suppose it's kinda hard to be specific to your life when you are sharing the list with millions of people who don't know you.

You can scroll through large lists of goals submitted by other users and add them to your own profile, or you can be spontaneous and think of your own. Some people would already have lists in their mind of goals they are trying to achieve or would like to achieve, but for others I think it is much harder. It's kind of confronting when you try to find 43 things you want to do in your lifetime. If you peruse this site you will see some examples of goals eg:

• drink more water
• write a novel
• kiss in the rain
• stop procrastinating
• plant a garden

The list goes on and on and on.

You can also keep track of your progress and blog about your progress, so if you wanted to "plant a garden" and today you actually bought the seeds, this would be recorded as progress.

I thought about putting my own list together, but of course you need to sign up, create a user name, password etc. Don't think I want to get zapped away into another site, have already spent far to much time reading other peoples goals. But still it is a cool site, and I think it could be used to motivate people toward their goals, it also has the support of on online community in the form of forum boards, comments etc.

Over all a cool site.