YouTube and Podcasts and Bears, oh my!

YouTube:

Well, I signed up for an account in YouTube (smilewithoutacat1), and I must say, I can’t see anything all that special about it. Maybe it’s that I have no interest at all in making, let alone publicly posting, videos of myself that I lack the YouTube love. It’s a little convenient, I guess, to have a favorites folder where I can stick some good stuff that I’d like to watch again or show someone, such as the Feed the Cat video (a.k.a. “Cat Man Do”) or the Birds of Paradise clip. But really, I can do that elsewhere with just as little hassle.

I could see uses for some sort of online video thing for the library. The most obvious, of course, is to have clips of our performers. Or then there’re more of those Storytime-At-Home kinds of possibilities. Or how about mini-tours of the branches? Or you could do clips about using certain databases (or ask the databases to produce them and we could link to the show). Or do a video component like L.H. is planning for the quarterly library newsletter – have local ‘celebrities’ do mini-interviews about books they like (or DVDs, audiobooks, CDs, etc.).

...Just don’t ask me to make these movies, that’s all I’m sayin’.

Podcasting:

Well, I understand YouTube even though I don’t love it; I’m not sure I even get to the understanding of podcasting. I suppose it’s to be expected... Everyone has a little internal Luddite, I guess this one’s mine. I just don’t get the point of why an individual would want to podcast like this.

Because the Ask a Ninja explanation rather lost me (a factory making apple pies for whales? Funny, sure, but also a big HUH??), I went to Wikipedia, as everything on Wikipedia’s right and correct and a good thing to do. Right? Anyway, they had a rather interesting list of uses for podcasts. It even mentions public libraries. So I suppose I can understand the idea of using it for education. And I can understand all the people and groups out there leaping at the chance to reach the ‘youngfolk’ on their own iTurf (such as politicians or religious types). But that strikes me as just another form of advertising, and as such, it annoys me. (I don’t like advertising. Gripe gripe gripe.)

I suppose the same ideas as I had for YouTube could apply to podcasting as well. But podcasting feels the most like bandwagon-jumping of all the explorations so far...

OK, I think I need a cookie.