I <3 podcasts bigtime. If anything is responsible for me getting healthier, it’s podcasts. The connection? Listening to something interesting gets me out walking and running more often than I would otherwise. And listening to library and technology related podcasts lets me do some professional development along the way.

My mp3 player is NOT an iPod – it’s an Archos 104 player. It’s similar in size to an iPod. But unlike an iPod, I can use it to play books downloaded from the library. And it has that all important bookmarking feature, which lets you put virtual bookmarks in multiple files so you can return to the right spot in any of them.

For this discovery exercise, I thought I’d use the time to upgrade Windows Media Player and clean up my virtual piles of podcasts and music. The latest version of WMP (version 11) still doesn’t have support for subscribing to podcasts. Not sure why, seems like there will be a growing demand for this.

I tried out several podcast retrieving programs that were supposed to work with WMP. The programs, iPodder and it’s later incarnation as Juice, just didn’t work. Rather than waste any more time, I’m still using iTunes to subscribe to podcasts. iTunes downloads the new episodes to my computer. Then WMP scans the hard drive for new files. It works well, but it’s not the most straightforward process.

I was also determined to finally learn a bit more about WMP, so finally spent a few minutes creating playlists and getting them synched properly to my mp3 player. This wasn’t hard, but I just needed to set aside a few minutes to do it and this was my excuse to take the time.

And that’s my podcast experience for ‘thing 3′!

(p.s. true confessions – I don’t run any more, but I can walk pretty darned fast)

I recall a time not too many years ago, that I kept running into very scary pages full of frightening code, with scary acronyms like xml and rss popping up in them. I knew I should figure it all out, but I kept saying “later”! I’m sure many people can relate to that feeling.

Finally, I took the plunge and instead of drowning, I’m swimming gleefully. I drew this silly sketch to use in classes that I teach, it shows a happy smiling me with all my favorite web sites sending me information. (it was inspired by a far more polished graphic!)

I’ve used bloglines, google reader, desktop feed readers, netvibes, igoogle, pageflakes and probably some other tools too. For now I use Google Reader the most. I keep a tab open in my browser and dip into it now and then throughout the day.

The advice that “You don’t have to read every single RSS item!” is key! Ignore the onslaught of info if you want to, dip in and read what looks interesting,
scan the headlines, save things that you want to refer back to.
Important stuff that you missed, will usually pop up in another place. We don’t all have to be on the cutting edge every minute (we used to call it the “bleeding edge” at my FPOW!)

How I keep up:

• Scan the headlines.Don’t read everything.
• Save items to come back to later (yeah, sometimes you won’t get back to them!)
• Mark everything as “read” now and then, (ah, doesn’t that feel good?)
• Don’t hesitate to add new stuff – better to add it than forget where that really useful resource is.
• That said, drop suscriptions that you never read
• Organize things into groups that work for you – “must read” “fun” “work” “personal” – whatever works for your life.

I love RSS, it’s the glue that lets us paste pieces of the web content wherever we want them. What do I mean by that?

For one thing, it makes it so easy to get all the news and info that I want to keep up with, constantly feeding into my Google Reader account. It keeps me ’stuck’ to all those sources without ever having to seem them out.

Nifty RSS tools (like feed2js) make it possible to ‘paste’ constantly updated information on our web sites. Little boxes full of the latest news headlines, book reviews, blog posts, events, etc. – all automatically updating without our help. Nice.

And how about the ability for us to get our library info out into the community?
RSS feeds of library booklists, events, blogs, topical information – we can use RSS to paste that content on our town web sites, on the pages of community organizations, businesses, schools, into library customer’s RSS readers and so on. That keeps those people and organizations constantly glued to our content and info.

And along those same lines, one of my favorite use of RSS – getting content out of our library magazine databases and into the hands of users. Students doing research can paste RSS feeds for subject searches into their own NetVibes (Pageflakes, iGoogle, Google Reader…) accounts and get frequent updates on the latest articles on their topics. Or use subject searches from databases to put something like the lastest consumer research articles on a subject guide page on your library web site. I call it “exposing your databases”! (the photo shows results from a database search showing up on a web page.)

RSS = magic = better connections