Audiobooks

Free audiobooks are available for download from Project Gutenberg. These are generally books with expired copyright. For instance, I am now listening to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein  through Windows Media Player.

Don’t go anywhere near the computer-generated audio books; they’re too freaky and weird to listen to. Stick with the human-read audio books instead.

I think the site needs to be upgraded and have better functionality.

The site is hard to navigate. For instance, in Browse by category: Audio book, human read, if you click on one of the letters to browse by say, authors beginning with H, this takes you to a list of all the authors Project Gutenberg has that start with H,  rather than only the ones which have audiobooks available. So you get links to authors’ Wikipedia entries or text versions of their books rather than audio books. If you only want audiobooks, you are better off scrolling through their long list of available audiobooks, listed alphabetically by author.

It also took me a while to figure out how to actually play the audiobook. With Frankenstein, for instance, it is not immediately clear which link to click to download the book. I was able to listen to the first section of the audiobook when I opened up Windows Media Player and then clicked the ‘main site’ link on the first MP3 Audio one. This file than started playing on the Windows Media Player.

Why not have it so it says, ‘Chapter 1: listen here’ or something? The site needs a pretty radical overhaul if they want the layperson to be able to navigate it.

Podcasts

I’ve just added Hack and Sunday Night Safran from Triple J podcasts to my Bloglines account.  I think technology such as podcasts, DVDs and the ability to download TV shows and movies fundamentally change the way we use media.

Whereas once people would stay home to watch a favourite show on a particular night, these days users can choose when and where they want to view or listen to a favourite show. I like how these technologies give media consumers more freedom to consume media as they choose.

Technorati

I have claimed my blog on Technorati and made a watchlist of tags like ‘libraries’ and ‘librarians’.

Del.icio.us

I am already familiar with del.icio.us, but have not used it regularly as yet.

My del.icio.us page can be found here.

I like the idea of the site, but I think one’s page can look quite messy with lots of links on it. I wanted to order my links alphabetically (the cataloguer comes out!) , but I can’t see a way to do that. My links are currently organised by last added to first added, which works fairly well.

I think that del.icio.us could certainly be useful for research. I like the idea of using tags to create a shared intelligence and share resources of interest.

Rollyo

I used Rollyo to ‘roll my own search engine’. This means you can create an individualised search engine using up to 25 websites on a particular topic. The Rollyo search engine will then only search the sites you have selected when you enter a query.

I created an Aussie Swing Dance search engine, using seven swing dance links from Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart. The results when I searched ‘Hobart’ weren’t bad, but I didn’t like that the sponsored links were intertwined with the regular results.

I don’t think I will end up using Rollyo myself, but I can see it’s value if you had a bunch of websites you particularly liked on a topic and didn’t want to search them all one by one.

RSS feeds

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?

I’m a fan of the Google blog search and Technorati.

Which Search tool was the easiest for you?

Google blog search, because I’m already really familiar with searching Google.

Which was more confusing?

The topix site seemed a bit confusing and didn’t bring up the sorts of things I expected when I tested a search for ‘Melbourne’. I think the site is too US focused.