Podcasting & RSS Feeds…and a bit of Wiki

I downloaded the podcast of Dr Karl’s triple JJJ show from the 12th of March because I am interested in science facts, and finding out more about the world. This podcast covered the current issue of the oil spill off the coast of Brisbane, among other topics. It was interesting to hear about the possible environmental costs: Dr Karl guesses it could be about five years before the damage could be repaired in our climate. More interesting still… what is behind the zombie phenomena? It turns out that a zombie can be ‘made’ by giving a person drugs to appear dead and then drugs to make them mad – so they have no will of their own. There is a good story that Karl tells that involves three brothers and a witch doctor, but you’ll have to download it to find out!

About the process of getting the RSS feed, I elaborated on it in my post on the 14th of March. It was quite simple to paste the URL into the subscribe box and receive the feed. However, as Cath and I discussed out of class, I was not able to receive this feed in Google Reader when logged in at uni. I also think something might be being blocked by the server.

I had never even heard of RSS feeds, and am still learning how to use them. They are very useful and efficient, as it saves me from going onto all the different blogs I am interested in to find updates. I would like to know if RSS feeds can be put onto this (our) blog pages. Does anyone know? Or, is that what is already on the dashboard page – I wonder if we can add other feeds to it?

I found that Farkas’ article about wikis was particularly helpful in clarifying my ideas about this technology. Wiki technology is both democratic and collaborative, in that anyone can participate in creating and editing content online. The section on how libraries could implement wikis gave me some good ideas and guidelines for their use. I have been finding that people are saying ‘Yay! wikis’ but it is more difficult to find articles giving practical advice. I will need to research this topic further.

PS: I just went on the version of the Web 2.0 adventure that we can edit. It was far more simple than I thought, and there is such pride seeing your words on something official. I added a link to an article that cautions people about the privacy of social networking sites. This is more to do with next week's task - I am exploring my feelings about Facebook ...