I had a look at the Podcastalley.com and did a search for book reviews. I chose the podcast called Books on the Nightstandand added their RSS feeds to my bloglines account (go to the folder called #21 - Podcasts, and the RSS feeds for Books on the Nightstand will be found there) .Each podcast for Books on the Nightstand would start off with a thought provoking question e.g. is there a difference between murder and suspense novels?, do you judge a book by it's cover?, or what do you look for in a book?. This type of discussion really hooks you into their podcast and makes you want to listen to what they have to say about the books they are reviewing. I must say I loved the content of their discussion on the plot, characters and underlying themes of the books - boy after their discussion on the book "The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson" I really wanted to read this book (access their podcast,10: Books with Buzz and you will see what I mean). This is definitely a tool that Manukau Libraries should include in it's Readers Advisory Service. By providing RSS feeds to podcasts like Books on the Nightstand customers are able to access book reviews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from any computer, ipod and cellphone as long as there is an internet connection, I like to think of this as "Book Reviews on the Run".
I selected a site from the Web 2.0 Awards list (the short list) and decided to look at imcooked which came first in the food category ( this is a web community for video sharing of recipes). I did a search for any videos related to the topic chocolate, and found a great video titled "Chocolate Mocha Cake" - this is really a recipe for all you chocolate lovers out there. Have a look at the video below:
The imcooked site is where users upload videos of themselves demonstrating how to cook their own recipes, even kids can demonstrate how to cook their own recipes, check out the video below titled "kids cooking shrimp stir fry".
This is another resource that library users can access from the internet, here they can look at cooking demonstrations online wherever they feel like it, leave comments, and make friends with others who enjoy cooking similar recipes. This is a web 2.0 site that libraries can definitely point patrons to.
I did have a look at the category called Events and choose Upcoming, you can definitely apply this to a library setting, although you must register first to advertise your events. You can search for events happening within your own country, you can even choose the day and month to see what events are happening on that particular day and in that particular month. Great for advertising Library Week, Manix, School Holiday Programmes, and Tea and Topics happening in Manukau Libraries. This could also be used to advertise festivals taking place in Manukau City like the Polynesian cultural festival, Chinese New Year celebrations, and concerts being held in the local area.
Zoho Writer is a web-based word processing tool that has many advantages, the major one is it's free, free I hear you say, YES it's free. Zoho Writer has the advantage of accessing files from any computer as long as we have access to the internet so we don't have to worry about dealing with defective floppy discs or using a flash drive. You can upload your existing documents/files and put them on the website, your documents are stored on a server on the internet which makes it accessible to all people you invite to edit this document. The good thing about Zoho Writer is people can work on this document simultaneously and create text collaboratively, you can track changes to this document and revert to earlier versions of it. You can edit, save and create new documents from any computer - the compatibility issue with different software versions doesn't exist here, which solves the problem of being unable to open particular files on the Learn.Net pcs e.g. Microsoft Works files. The features that Zoho Writer offers like - page numbering, footnotes, templates, sharing, publishing to the web, exporting files as a .pdf document and an email feature is far superior to Microsoft Word. However the application is dependent on the internet and maybe a liability, because if one is dependent on the internet and the internet goes down then work can be seriously lost/delayed. So in this instance it may not totally replace the traditional word processor. Another plus is documents can be emailed on-masse or uploaded to the web or blogs. The major advantage of Zoho Writer is that any changes I make to a document will regularly save across the internet to Zoho Writer, if I am working offline my documents can be downloaded and stored on my laptop, I can then view and edit my documents offline. When I go back online my changes will automatically be saved to the server, and others can then see the changes I have made.
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