Thing 16: YouTubING

YouTube is the Google of videos. You can find almost any video on there.

I've used it to find election coverage during the presidential elections, browsing reruns, watching movie trailers, and checking out music videos. Of course, you need a good internet connection, and I couldn't imagine doing it with dial up.

The library videos on Neflin's 23 Things were funny, and I can imagine putting YouTube to good use with things like the Common Craft Show videos. Those are really great.

Here is a music video that recently came out by Enya this past winter. It's nice to be able to embed it onto a Web page.



Going back to the classics, here's a video of the intro to an 80's tv series...



Any favorite movies anyone? Here's the trailer to one of my all-time favorites...



Neat stuff!

Thing 15: Rollyo...yo...yo your boat...

I thought the concept of Rollyo was really great. I love the idea of customizing and personalizing things. Nevertheless, I was a little disappointed with the outcome.

I was reminded of a service offered a while back called "Yahoogle" that allowed you to conduct one search while looking at search results from Yahoo and Google simultaneously. I tried this with Rollyo but was warned it wouldn't work effectively with search engines.

So then, I tried a new search with government sites and tried to find food stamp applications and other E-Government tools. I didn't really get pinpoint information and therefore gave up on Rollyo.

Perhaps if I find sites that are worth searching through, I may try this again, but I just can't really find a use for this right now, either personally or professionally as a librarian.

Thing 14: Online Productivity Tools....Whoa!

Finally! We get to the long-awaited iGoogle! This is indeed one of my favorite things. I've had an account for some time now and couldn't imagine hardly anything better. I admit, it's not as innovative as Scrybe, but Scrybe would not allow me to register (I guess it was full), and you almost have it all with iGoogle.

Let me count the ways...gmail, gnews, gtime, gcalendar, gtodo, gweather, gmaps, greader, gchat and any other widget you can add to it. AND, it is accessible on mobile devices.

I must admit though, I'm not a big fan of a public online calendar. Terrorism awareness anyone? Or am I just being insecure? And then, if I make it private, what if I have no internet? Scrybe had a neat offline option with sync capabilities, displayed in a dynamic fashion, but then again, registration is currently closed. And then do I really want another username and password? Mobile capabilites would be nice also.

I heard of 30 boxes before, but it seemed a little cluncky.