Thing 5

I knew a fair amount about online video and podcasts, but officially completed this Thing anyway. Youtube is always a fun way to spend some time and I've listened to a quite a few podcasts from NPR before. I've never used Hulu, although I have streamed TV shows through network websites. Standard TV/cable is slowly on its way out, I think. Even now, I rarely watch live tv, but instead watch shows I've recorded on the DVR.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to post a video onto my blog. I kept looking for a tab to enter the URL into, but finally just pasted the URL into the text area. Even though I was just seeing the long URL, when I clicked on "preview", the URL had disappeared and the video was in its place. I chose a popular music video with a Rube Goldberg theme, just because I think it is fun. Here it is:



I added the podcast for NPR's "Wait, wait, don't tell me" into my RSS feed. Also NEJM's podcast. I tried finding podcasts from journals more closely related to my medical specialty, but I haven't found any yet. I've heard about universities posting podcasts of lectures and I'd love to find some of those. I'd be interested in learning about various topics just for fun (art history, economics, anthropology, etc).

I spent about an hour on this thing, including checking out all of the podcast search websites (which I added to my delicious bookmarks). I also watched some of the video on the anthropology of youtube. Interesting!

Thing 4

I signed up for a Delicious account and added most of my personal computer's bookmarks. I plan on adding my work computer bookmarks also. Having had computers crash and die before (thus losing all of my previous bookmarks), I can see the advantage of having them located at a separate site accessible anywhere. It will also be helpful to have all of my bookmarks in one spot, rather than different ones on different computers, etc. I found the adding and tagging of bookmarks easy. I didn't add a few that I wasn't sure I wanted accessible by others (bank login pages, etc), although I know I can limit who can view them. Privacy worries me slightly, which is one advantage of computer specific bookmarks.
I'm interested in trying the social cataloging sites too, hoping this will help me keep track of what I'm reading and get ideas from others.
I spent about one hour on Thing 4.

Thing 3

I was really excited to learn about RSS, since it sounded like a great way to keep track of many websites in one place. I like the idea of having both personal and medical resources available in one location. I've already added my favorite news sites and some blogs that sounded interesting. I did some searches by entering hobbies into the Google reader add subscription box. Tomorrow I will try to add some medical journal RSS feeds. I'd like to use this to keep up with journals, hoping that by having easy, regular, and mind-free access to the table of contents will help motivate me to read more papers.
I spent about an hour and a half on this, mostly playing around and testing it out, but still feel like I need to play with it over the next few days to get a better hang of it. I found it easy to search for sites on the google reader page, but harder to just go to a website and click on the RSS icon and then figure out how to get it in to my RSS feed reader. Practice will help, I'm sure.
Webcinia looks interesting. I like being able to put in a desired medical specialty and then getting many (but not all) of the top journal TOCs. I need to spend more time looking at it too.