Week 9 Thing 21 Podcasts

Thing 21. Podcasts.
I have added a podcast called Book Voyages to my Bloglines account. "Book Voyages is a podcast about children's literature from the point of view of a school library/media specialist. It features reviews of books as well as inteviews with students and authors." http://www.podcast.net/show/39068

I also added NPR Books for its book reviews & interviews with authors. There was a good interview with the director of a new movie called The Keeper, about the life of Omar Khayam. I think the NPR podcasts will be of great interest to me personally & may be of use for book groups, readers advisory etc.
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=4819383

I found some interesting Travel podcasts on Podcast Alley.
http://podcastalley.com/podcast_genres.php?pod_genre_id=16

I liked the Yahoo Podcasts site, and found useful information on creating a podcast. I liked their Podcast Search & that is how I initially found the NPR Books podcasts. I also looked on the NPR site to find them that way.

I liked the idea of podcasts of children's stories that Denver Public Library had, but hated the psychedelic visuals that accompanied them. I found them very distracting & disturbing. A picture of the book cover would have been much nicer. (They also had these visuals on the NPR podcasts, is this a common thing?)

I read a lot about creating podcasts and as long as you have a microphone it did not seem to be a difficult process. I could see the library using podcasts for Book talking & certainly for book reviews. I think it would be interesting if Jen could record podcasts of her interviews with authors for Jen's Jewels. We could have podcasts with important messages, e.g. school closings or library closings in the winter. There may be ways we could use podcasts for seniors, as some of them find reading difficult. We could use them for staff training and even reports from ALA/PLA conferences. It seems to me that wherever you need to disseminate information, a podcast could be used. There seem to be multiple uses for them.