While gearing up for different conference trips and presentations, I’ve been trying to get to know collaborators using asynchronous communications, such as listening to Char James-Tanny’s podcast on techwritervoices.com. She presented “Virtual Ways of Communicating” at a Florida STC meeting and Tom Johnson recorded it and posted it later.
I really enjoyed not only listening to Char speak but also hear the audience questions and interactions. For example, when she showed tag clouds, one audience member asked, does the size and format of the tag words change when a tag is used more often than another? And I thought, wow, I’ve always assumed that is exactly how it works, but haven’t actually asked the question, such as refresh rate or what relative sizing means. It points out to me that I take a lot for granted in the Web 2.0 world due to observing so much of it so often. But, a new fresh perspective offers me the conceptual details that people would seek when first exposed to something like a tag cloud.
As part of listening to this podcast, I found many suggestions for cool videos, popular wikis, and new uses of RSS such as RSS that I hadn’t heard yet. I realize that no matter how hard I try to keep up, there are new applications of technology coming in every day. I thought I’d collect these together though as a nice collection of “have you seen this?” which may not make much sense unless you listen to the podcast, but these were enjoyable to hear about and explore on my own.
- Video – lions rescue a buffalo baby
- Video – how to use a book (Updated to the one with English subtitles, thanks Char!)
- Wiki – Swarm sketch, watch animated historical views of sketches being created
- Wiki – Pirate master from a TV show
- RSS – Yahoo pipes, later learned about the Social Media firehose pipe from Char
- Search engine – Ms Dewey
- Map mashup – housingmaps.com mashup of craigslist and Google maps