Podcasts, audiobooks, closing thought

I don't listen to podcasts much, but have at times appreciated these:

1. Entitled Opinions, with Robert Harrison
2. In Our Time, with Melvyn Bragg
3. Radio Open Source, with Christopher Lydon
4. Naked Scientists, with Dr. Chris Smith

Haven't listened to audiobooks at all, yet. Maybe if I win the iPod!

Closing thoughts: I'm reminded of my first date with the woman who married me. Emotions included nervousness, of course, and a sort of quasi-reluctant amazement, and a sense that this could be the start of something tremendous -- or the start of a tremendous blunder.

The ELL showed us so many trees and branches, so many ways to save time and to lose time. There are so many social sites, YouTube offerings, Flickr options. There's not enough time to maintain one's own blog, let alone read many others. I remain uncertain how much energy to allocate for it all. But that can be said of any education.

I believe the historian Thomas Carlyle was reputed to be the last man to have read all the books available to him. I don't long for such an era, an era of vastly reduced choices. But I would prefer to be less awash in information... since most of it isn't worth the time it takes to figure out it's not worth the time.

Exploring Web 2.0 - site comparison

Week 10 (Things 18 and 19) --

Briefly poked around the word processing and spreadsheet tools, then...

Checked out the Web 2.0 Awards list and looked at the two top-rated travel sites: Farecast.com and Kayak.com. Both are useful for zeroing in on cheap fares. I preferred Kayak, for the ease of altering itinerary variables, and for its clever use of a calendar with Lowest Fare listed directly in each date box.

Wiki, don't lose that number

(Little joke for any Steely Dan fans out there.)

Wiki seems a great collaborative tool, easy to learn and use. At the EPL "places to eat" wiki I just added Mt. Everest Restaurant -- took about 20 seconds. (Of course, no EPL staffers need my advice about Mt. Everest.)

Del.icio.us, Twitter, Web 2.0 thoughts

Del.icio.us offers the promise of speeding up your research. Most potential sources have been looked at by others countless times before; some of the look-atters who preceded you posted useful links on the web; del.icio.us lets you take advantage of their work without guilt--they become your willing and anonymous Advance Team researchers. And via del.icio.us, their work and your own become accessible pretty much anywhere.

But Twitter? Not for me. Can't see the percentage in trying to process that life-interrupting info. It brings to mind a nightmare I had once, of inexplicably trying to film my ordinary day-to-day life and then struggling to find time to view that film -- while still being filmed.

- - -
As for Thing 15 (this comment added several weeks later, after perusing some other folks' Web 2.0 perspectives): I appreciate my colleague Barb Levie's thoughts, as well as Rick Anderson's (in the "Away from the Icebergs" piece Barb referenced on her blog). I have some conservative tendencies, among them a reluctance to embrace new technologies if I perceive a potential threat to seemingly unimportant things like downtime, time to reflect. But maybe I carry that too far.

Here's the Anderson quote that I (like Barb) find especially provocative:
"No profession can survive if it throws its core principles and values overboard in response to every shift in the zeitgeist. However, it can be equally disastrous when a profession fails to acknowledge and adapt to radical, fundamental change in the marketplace it serves. At this point in time, our profession is far closer to the latter type of disaster than it is to the former."

To Barb's comments ("Are we leaving the non-digitally connected segments of our population in the dust? Are we moving too fast for them? What happens when we lose the power grid?") I would add: Are we moving too fast, period? But on the other hand, what are the risks of foot-dragging?

LibraryThing account

Account opened but as yet undeveloped.

Looking forward to next week's themes of
"Tagging, Folksonomies & Twitter" (and to
the following week's catch-up time!).

To paraphrase Peter Finch

ELL activities #10, #11, and #12, about networking, have me thinking about Network the movie. While I appreciate the power of connectors like MySpace, FaceBook, and LinkedIn, I wonder whether, if I start using one of them, I run the risk of flipping out and shouting "I'm connected as hell! And I'm not gonna take it anymore!"

Not sure I want to expand my "community" so drastically. I already feel challenged just keeping up with my non-virtual community -- family, neighbors, friends from old days.

But LibraryThing looks worthwhile, and less likely to be a time-sink.

Image isn't everything

Explored Flickr and YouTube. Gotta improve my skill at skipping past the eye-catching time-wasting stuff.

Easier said than done, given that the internet's basic design encourages bouncing around among mostly unworthy sites and images. See Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in the current Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google/

Brief mashup comment (added 10/6, re: Thing 8): Marcos Weskamp's "Flickr Graph" caught my eye. But as in so many things web-related it shifts emphasis from the language of relationships to the images of relationships. Tools like Weskamp's are clever and fun, and potentially useful in helping us visualize social links. I just wish they were not beginning to replace (for many folks) thoughtful statements about who people are, and what they mean to us. Like any tool, Weskamp's can be used wisely, or foolishly overused.