I am on Blackboard IM, job search project & podcasts

Hi,

For anyone who is on Blackboard IM, I am on it now. So let me know if you want to connect through it.

Job search 2011 group project is turning out to be more benefical to me than I expected it to be. I knew I would benefit from it but I don't think I knew how much. I am so glad that we picked this topic. There are great resources out there and using these resources teaches me skills that I need and motivates me to try out the new skills :)

I listened to a lot of podcasts this week to see which one would be a good artifact for time capsule. While listening to it, I realized that some hosts really go off the topic and go on and on about other things while some really stay focused. Listening to so many taught me a few things that I would do or not do if I were making a podcast myself. First, I would stay on topic. Second, I would keep it short. Podcasts seem somewhat different from regular radio shows. There might be regular subscribers but some people also want to listen to particular episodes for a targeted reason. I was one of those listeners this week and really did not enjoy having to go through episodes that lasted moreo than a hour. If it were a podcast was being created as a marketing tool, it would definitely have to stay under 15 seconds... or at least have something that grabs attention in the first ten second.

Another prediction on death of libraries...

Here's yet another article that predicts that libraries will start to shut down... It's titled "The birth of the Kindle Tablet and the death of the public library."It is true that when my family, who only recently could purchase one of these e-readers, found that many of the fairy tales were loaded on to the reader for free. We enjoyed reading them but I feel like the death of the public library has been foretold for so long that all public libraries must be dead by now. Although it is true that the number of public libraries are decreasing due to budget cuts, libraries have evolved enough to face new challenges brought on by new competition and new technology. When will the majority get the libraries offer more than fairy tales? It's interesting how some of these articles that are obviously advertising the new gadget think public libraries have so little to offer...

Looking for artifacts for group project

Looking for artifacts for our group project is kind of making my head spin. I keep thinking about what prof. Franks said in the email - that we need to focus on the story we want to tell about 2011 but I am not sure if our subtopics aligns with that... One thing for sure is that it's making me connect more through social networking sites and to do more serious job searching... Hopefully, all of this will result in not just a good grade but also a job for me...

Vimeo vs. YouTube

Ok, maybe I get convinced easily but after reading an article titled "Best Video Hosting Service: Youtube vs Vimeo For Embedded Streaming Video" (http://setsallset.hubpages.com/hub/-Best-Video-Hosting-Service-Youtube-vs-Vimeo-For-Embedded-Streaming-Video), I got convinced that Vimeo is a better option to upload videos to be shared on my Web site or blogs because according to this article, Vimeo does not have the feature that recommends videos after my video finishes so it's less likely that viewers of my video will move onto watching another video on YouTube instead of read further on my Web site or blog. I guess it's a different story if you have a "channel" on YouTube since YouTube definitely has a larger user base but for embedding videos on your own Website or blogs Vimeo does sound like a better option. Also, I am not thinking about the other pro's and con's discussed in the article like the limit on how much they let you upload since I currently don't have much to upload.

But I wonder if it's still true that Vimeo does not recommend any videos at the end of every video. So I uploaded the same video (LIBR 285 presentation) on Vimeo. If you've seen my previous posting, you will be able to compare what YouTube does and what Vimeo does.

The URL of the same video on Vimeo is ... well I will provide it for you when and if Vimeo finishes uploading... I am not sure what the problem is but it can't seem to upload the last view bytes of the file... So maybe this should change my view of Vimeo...

Editted video using Picasa3

Since we were supposed to edit videos for LBR 284 this week, I took this opportunity to edit an Elluminate recording. First I had to save the Elluminate recording as a video file. To do this, you have to install Elluminate Publish tool. It's for free. The Elluminate recording that I wanted to edit was a presentation I did for LIBR 285. This recording contained multiple presentations but I wanted to clip just my part so that I could use it for my ePortfolio. I could not figure out how to "publish" just a portion of the Elluminate recording using Elluminate Publish so I ended up with more than 2 hours of video which was a huge file. Thanks to the assignment for this course, I got to download Picasa and clip just my presentation from this long file. Here's the URL of the file on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrwnZ4vZzI

Saving everything...

For Electronic Records Management class, we were asked to read and article about all of Twitter being archived (http://www.slate.com/id/2251429/). When I first heard about this, I thought it was kind of ridiculous but the article, along with the book I am reading for my book review for this class, kind of gave me a new perspective. The whole idea of saving everything seemed very ridiculous and seemed like we would be creating a big unusable junk!

Reading this article makes me think more deeply into how we don't know what will be valuable to researchers of the future. It also makes more sense to leave the sorting to the future generation since the future generation is more likely to have better tools than the current generation. We still do have to do our part in properly saving metadata with the records. Plus, it's true that it's probably impossible to save every bit of data but I think the future generation will have a better solution about that too.

I have to admit that leaving everything upto the future generation definitely sounds irresponsible but even so, better safe than sorry, right? So, if we can afford to save as much as we can, why not? But then there's also the talk about the affordability. While the high unemployment rate doesn't seem to be going down and children have to face worse and worse school conditions due to budget cuts, do we really want to spend the money on saving all the Tweets for the future historians? When I think about the costs, I would rather have my tax money be used on schools and creating more jobs...

LIBR 284 Week 3 Tech Tool Discussion

For this week, I was required to explore some more online Web 2.0 tools for one of the courses I am taking at SJSU's SLIS. I chose to explore tools on Photo. Below is a video cast created by Jing and uploaded on screencast.com. It shows the tools that I've explored.