#10 Youtube and suchlike

In the previous 2 posts I had a quick look at firstly posting video, then posting screencasts. Like everyone I like YouTube, but I find it not very useful for browsing. I mostly use it for finding a song when my wife is astounded that there's another seventies or eighties Aussie 'classic' that I've never heard of.

It's mostly great for hosted videos, for being a handy place where people can store their video and then present it on their own page.

Screencasts

As a quick test of practically instantaneous screencasting I did the following using screentoaster. Doing this took maybe a minute longer than the video runs, and that's including registering and uploading. The only drawback is that the text is not readable when the video is that size. But you can click on the fullscreen button fora perfectly legible version.

Record your screencast online

Youtube embedding

Here is a thing pasted in from youtube:

#9 Flickr

Contrary to all the earlier grumping about things I quite like Flickr. It's particularly good for finding pictures by people you like. For example we've got a print by kozyndan on the wall at home and I reckoned it'd be nice to have a similar matching picture on the computer desktop. So I searched for kozyndan in illustrations and got a nice bunnyfish picture at high resolution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kozyndan/178515521/sizes/s/in/set-72057594089912089/ (some of their pictures are probably NSFW, but this one is of a bunch of bunnyfish so it's okay.)

# 8 Library Thing

I once looked into Library Thing. Then looked at my bookshelves and realised how much work it would be to enter my books and gave up.

The problem was that I couldn't work out what it would do for me besides find out what books other people who read books like the ones that I like also like. This might be a useful thing if you're not sure what you want to read next but I usually have a whole bunch of things I really want to get read. Adding more things to the list would just be asking for trouble.

#7 Tagging and Del.icio.us

I'm falling a bit behind with this so I'll try and do a bunch of things

I used to use del.icio.us a bit while I was studying but then kind of stopped. I work on the principle that if I can't remember enough about the site to find it again then it probably didn't have much to recommend it.

But that's just for using it for studying my own bookmarks -- I do find it useful occasionally for searching, if I'm trying to track down something particularly obscure. Mind you, now that I think about it I've not actually used it for searching for anything in quite some time.

I'm of two minds when it comes to tags -- I'll use them if they're there but rarely find their lack to be a great loss.

#6 Podcasts and suchlike

I'm just getting confused now. I kind of mentioned podcasts in my previous post - or at least compiling an ad hoc one using hufduffer.

The podcasts I most enjoy myself are the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayos film reviews podcast on BBC radio 5, the Big Ideas one from tv0 in Canadia. Hang on -- I was going to link to the Big Ideas podcast but the television station's entire website has vanished from the internet. Aw man, I hope they're okay. The domain squatters who are sitting on the site now have even altered the robots.txt so you can't even look at old copis of the page using the Wayback Machine. Damn them!!

>edit a week or two later< Oh. It's working fine now: Big Ideas