Youtube

With youtube, you can look up almost anything. Youtube has allowed many people become overnight celebrities. A rapper by the name of Soldier Boy became an overnight success gaining more popularity than some bigtime artists just by creating a video blog and uploading videos weekly. Currently some mega artists are seeking the same avenues that Soldier Boy pursued and releasing their music video previews on Youtube. Similarly, some independednt film makers realise the crisis the film industry is going through and are taking similar steps. Alex Jones, an indeendent film maker, has created many documentaries and makes all of them available on you tube in full length and now in HD. This is a new feature, you can view the excellent DVD quality in Wide Screen on youtube now. On my youtube profile, I have subscribed to a few accounts of my favorite users, namely, I enjoy watching music videos from some indy artists and am kept up to date on their new songs and when they are coming to town. I can send the video to someone who i think can appreciate it and unsubscribe to that artists videos when i lose interest.

The beauty of choice!

Podcasting

I've recently bought an Ipod touch and played around with the itunes store features of subscribing to podcasts and being able to creat podcasts using nothing more than a camera and a video editing software. A couple of weeks ago, I was having problems with a Finance course I am taking and simply reading a textbook was not helping me understand completely under what pretext I would use discounted cash flow analysis. I was barely awake during the lecture when the professor was talking about it and it was 11 pm so calling a classmate was also out of the question. I had remembered that UC Sanford had a itunes University page on the itunes store and most of their class lectures were video taped and offered online. I simply went on to the itunes store, searched sanford, browsed the finance section and downloaded the discounted cash flow analysis part which thoroughly explained everything. I thought to myself, my god, this can be a great thing or a horrible thing. One one hand, people like me can go back and review the content and have a reference point to turn back to and on the other hand, students can completely disregard and not go to their lectures!! I think podcasting has some very useful purposes though not only for this, up and coming musical artists will use podcasting to keep in touch with their fan base and keep their fans up to date on new albums upcoming concerts etc. As of now, I subscribe to over 26 podcasts and the beauty is that whenever i connect my device, itunes automatically downloads and copies the newest podcasts to my ipod and removes any previously viewed ones.

Browser Tools

I never much cared for browser extensions, they often made the browser look congested and I noticed I would get a lot of pop ups and ad ware. Until I saw google toolbar. Since I use google for almost any and every thing on a daily basis. I found this toolbar very useful. It allows you to search for anything from any website on the fly. as well as allowing you to bookmark your pages you come across. Excellent option from google and it is compatible with almost any browser

Facebook Social Networking

I have been a member of Facebook for a little over 2 years now and I must say; with this helpful tool, I was able to keep in touch with some of my former highschool, primary school and former college friends. With facebook, you can find friends by searching for their name and you can find mutual friends by looking at their profiles. Social Networking , however , does have its downfalls as well. Much of your personal information and personal activities can be made public for everyone in your network to see. There have also been reports of employment contracts being jeopardized due to a bad raport being displayed on social networking sites. In my opinion however, you must follow correct online etiquette when displaying any personal information online. I try to practice not putting too much details on my profile. All in all, I believe that one of my favorite sites of all time is facebook, it provides the user with an online album which you can share with friends who are many thousand miles away as well as a mechanism to keep in touch with new and old friends.

Google Services

Google is no longer simply a search engine. They have a stranglehold on the information services arena. Most users use google though for searching for businesses, research projects, addresses or simply because they are too lazy to type in the URL for the destination. Right now google has introduced many services such as google maps, where you can search for addresses and it will show you the actual satellite image of the location as well as google scholar where you can look up articles and indexes for free. I was introduced today to google docs which is a virtual document briefcase where you can save and store all your documents. As a computer technician, I run across many users who have corrupted a floppy disk or lost a USB key, Google docs eliminates this problem. In addition, you can customize your mygoogle page to only communicate and display things that are of interest to you. Google does this by using files called cookies which monitor your online activity and get a rough idea of what types of things you are into. For example a historian who types in Lincoln will return the results of pages of abraham lincoln wheras a car enthusiast who types the same thing will receive an ad or a review of the lincoln car. This is a very useful tool rather than a boring homepage which stays the same everytime. I receive news on a daily basis regarding the things i want to hear about. Its great!

Library thing

I've always wondered how well rated a book is before I actually went ahead and bought it.. Amazon does a fairly good job at that but doesnt quite give as much details and reader description as library thing does. in Library thing, I was able to search for my favorite subjects and read little synopsis of the book in question as well as read what other users thought about the book. I find this tool very useful for book advocates and also to save a user from buying something that they didnt intend on buying.

http://www.librarything.com/home/Sinak6

Tagging

I first came across the concept of tagging in social networking sites such as myspace and facebok but this is a revolutionary way of saving any tag, bookmarks. I can not begin to explain the frustration in losing all your bookmarks when formatting your computer to its factory settings, luckily, with this new technology you can retain all your favorite sites with this helpful website

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/Sinak6?count=15