YouTube Fun

YouTube is a site that I used on a fairly regular basis. It's one of the best (if not THE best) free sources of streaming media. I can listen to songs, watch music videos, movie trailers, or just about anything (excepting entire movies). One of the things I dislike about YouTube, however, is the ability to comment on videos. With the advent of Twitter and Facebook, it is evident that people love to post their own specific thoughts on a subject. With many videos, one will find comments with profanities filled with racism and hate. Because YouTube is so large, I would think it would be hard to keep track of the comments posted.

YouTube could be used in multiple ways in a library. Firstly, what if your library doesn't have a recording of a specific song or piece that a patron needs immediately? You could refer them to YouTube because, chances are, they'll have it. YouTube could also be used in conjunction with Facebook (which actually has its own place to upload videos) to communicate with patrons about new acquisitions or features within the library.

I found this video of Horowitz playing his "Carmen Fantasie" at a concert in (what I believe to be) 1966. Check it out!

Flickr Tools/Mashups

I found this part of Flickr to be intriguing and worth investigating. Although I looked at quite a few mashups and different tools available to the Flickr user, my favorite one was the Mappr. I thought it was neat that other applications could work with Flickr to provide even better access to information than it could do by itself. The whole concept of displaying images of a map has been taken from this idea and taken it to a different level. For example, if one looks at GoogleEarth, he will see that the same type of technology is used but mostly for landscapes and outdoor scenery. Another large difference is that the user assigns GoogleEarth a specific latitude/longitude location whereas Mappr is based on the tags [metadata] that the user provides. Unfortunately, from the information I read, I found out that Mappr is no longer working :(. I did, however, find an interesting replacement. If you start on Flickr's main webpage and go to "explore" and then to "world map," one will find a hybrid of this mashup application.

Flickr or Facebook...?

I find it quite peculiar that Flickr is included in a list of "23 Things Information Professionals Need To Know." In fact, after looking the site, I am even more perplexed as to why this is important. Sure, Flickr has some cool features and lots of metadata [tags] to describe the images you post. I also like that it is another type of online community that allows users to interact with each other in ways not imaginable before. But who uses Flickr instead of Facebook? In a library setting, wouldn't the library want to create a Facebook page? Libraries are dying. And Flickr is not going to meet your users where they are. At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that a user isn't going to bother typing in your Flickr site to see your library's photos if they can type in your library's name with a few keywords on Facebook. As information professionals, we need to know that things like Flickr exist, and, perhaps, expect to teach our patrons how to use them. However, the usefulness of sites like these in a library setting remains to be seen. Of course, to play devil's advocate, what happens if a user doesn't have a Facebook page? In that case, Flickr would tremendously useful. [Note: The probability of this situation is HIGHLY unlikely.] Hmm...

However, my rant is done. I did find a nice image of Vladimir Horowitz playing the piano. I suspect this to be from one of his Carnegie Hall recitals...


What an amazing musician.