I have Wikied

I have now wiki'd (wikied?) an entry in the FPL restaurant guide.
I will be interested to read what others add.

Sadly, I turn to wikipedia for lots of things these days.
When I wanted to remind myself about the difference between sulfates and sulfites, I went to wikipedia.

Whenever I hear about a town I would like to explore, I go to the Wikipedia entry. Not exclusively, but I do like the general run down of the history and locales.

I am too brain dead right now to suggest wiki projects for FPL, but will likely nod with agreement when my coworkers recommend some.

Podcasts

I am a huge fan of Podcasts and have many that I download to my iPod regularly.
I particularly enjoy NPR programs.

After visiting a few of the sites from this 23 Things Assignment, I am convinced that FPL could make good use of podcasting in several areas.

I listened to a very good reading of Jan Brett's book The Mitten from the Worthington Library page. It was well done and enjoyable. We could offer this kind of children's programming from our library as well.

The Denver Public Library offered Podcasts of children reading some familiar nursery rhymes. This was pretty painful. I guess it would be okay if you were the child's parent. But for the casual listener, this was just excrutiating. Let's not do this.

Many of the sites were inactive. I don't know if the website was not working or if they had ceased podcasting all together.

Here are some of the ways we could podcast

stories
nursery rhymes/songs
booktalks (grouped or individually)
book discussion groups
student storytellers could record their stories to promote the Lone Star Storytelling Festival
poetry contest winners reading their work
Tips of the day
something to do with New arrivals

Those are my thoughts. I like the podcasts and hope that we can get the equipment and time to do this on a regular basis.

Hulu, Who knew?

I have tuned into to Hulu a number of times to find some tv shows.
It has worked reasonably well. A couple of times I had sound issues, but that MAY have been with my computer and not Hulu.

Mostly I choose to watch things on my NetFlix instant watch account since that is already paid for and commercial free. But if it is not available from NetFlix, I next go to the NBC, PBS, CBS site and watch it there. As a last result I will go to Hulu. Seems to be a fine system I have developed for myself.

I think the most thought provoking thing about the 23 Thnigs questions were the ones about how this will impact public libraries. I'd like to think that maybe we could spend less of our dough on dvds in the future as folks find other ways to watch movies, tv shows, etc.

Right now, Frisco Public checks out 10,000 dvds a month from our youth and 10,000 dvds a month from the adult services collections. So 20% of our monthly circulations are dvds. I don't see it going down soon (with the poor economy). But perhaps as technology catches up, we can find ways to direct people to downloads of video and not house the physical dvds in the library. That would be fine by me.

Plus, I want to put in a plug for Redboxes. $1 to rent a movie in a minute from a Redbox, 1 minute to return it to ANY Redbox (try THAT with a Blockbuster Video!). This is my next go-to way to see a movie that is not available from NetFlix. You can find them all over the place and they even send you a thoughtful email about your rental (where it came from, when it is due, etc) AND then sends you an email when you have returned the movie! That is very cool.