The Librarian's Lounge

Today's Update

I know, it's been a long time coming.

I just discovered a new artist whose music was featured in the film "Loving Annabelle" - Jake Newton. Wow. I went directly to CDBaby and bought his album online. I love his sound. I hope to hear much more from him.

While I was on CDBaby, I noticed they now have a Film Baby site where you can buy independently released movies. What a great idea! I'm always looking for new interesting documentaries and films, so I'm psyched to have learned about this today.

I've spent the last couple days beefing up my podcast subscriptions and have found some great ones. I usually do most of my podcast listening when I'm weeding books out of my collection and have managed to finally get through the This American Life archives after several years of listening. I really need to donate some money to them. One thing I've really taken notice of while browsing for interesting podcasts is how many of the ones that sound the most appealing have gone defunct for lack of money. Although most of their archives are still available online, it's disturbing to see how many radio shows have been abandoned because of funding issues. One really great site I just found that had led me to many great shows is Public Radio Fan. The coolest thing about that site is that the homepage shows you what's on the radio now around the world and provides links to those that are available online for instant listening, along with links to podcasts and homepages of the shows. I've done extensive searching on that site over the past couple days and have found it to be very up to date and useful. Among my discoveries this weekend are Joe Frank, Outfront, Third Coast Audio International Festival, All in the Mind, and Curious Orange. Suddenly I am struck with the same depressing dilemma I have with books - too many awesome podcasts, too little time before I die to hear it all.

Checking out Vside

I spent the evening in vSide, a virtual world seemingly aimed at teen music lovers. It does seem a bit like a 3D Myspace, except more commercial. Basically, you can wander around these different small city-like places, each one consisting of different venues, shops, and residential spots that play different music channels. You have the ability to rate the music you hear, talk to other people, shop with "creds" you can buy via your credit card, "emote" with various available actions, and check out people's profiles.

The graphics in this virtual world are very cool-looking. The avatars have a cartoon-like quality to them. The landscapes and characters are fast-loading, unlike what you usually find to be the case in Second Life. This, in itself, makes it easier to navigate.

However, at this point, there's not much to see or do. The shops want you to spend real money on clothes, and clothes seems to be the only thing available to buy. Considering how little there seems to do there besides walk around and hear the different channels, I'm not sure why I'd care to spend money on clothes at the moment. I appear to have access to only 3 main city-places, and one of them won't load. The music that I've heard in the other two all sounds pretty much the same to me - a lot of it is current pop, rock, and hip hop. I heard all of 3 songs I like in the space of 2 hours in-world - 2 by Gwen Stefani and one by Coldplay. And there doesn't seem to be a way to find out where the music you're interested in might be playing.

The avatar customization seems very limited, as are the free clothing choices. I can't help but feel that  they're expecting to make a killing off selling in-world items like Second Life does, as if what they have at this point is anywhere near what you can find in SL in terms of creativeness and variety. The vSide vendors seem to be selling what you'd find at Old Navy, which isn't much of a fantasy - I'd rather pretend I'm buying clothes for a grand ball if I'm going to spend real money. I mean, I can see spending some Lindens on an ornate imaginative costume but not on simple jeans and t-shirts, particularly if I'm going to be branded by the shop in the process. In fact, one of the more disturbing parts of one's vSide profile is the brands section, where one can identify with as many brands as one's heart desires through the use of tags.

As far as events go, it seems like all the coming attractions are dj parties and a bunch of "talk shows."

vSide does not allow custom-made content, unlike Second Life. So much for the creative impulse.

vSide also depends a lot on web-browsing access. If you want to see someone's profile, you get sent to the web. If you want to make changes to your own, you get sent to the web. This definitely takes away from the seamlessness of the application at this stage.

After reading this article from Metaversed on vSide, I was expecting to be pretty wowed. Granted, the graphics are darn cool. But the world itself seems so limited at this point. I'm just wondering whether the music and graphics is enough to make teens want to use this space for socializing.   

Tonight I am going to see Crowded House in concert. Crowded House's music has been such a huge part of my life that if you were to cut open my heart, it would bleed the lyrics of every song Neil Finn has ever written. To say I am excited to see them again doesn't do any justice to my real feelings about it. I only wish Paul was still around.

I have just found out about a training I am fortunate enough to be able to attend. It's on virtual reference in Second Life and is being taught by the Alliance Library System of Illinois, the creators of Info Island. I volunteered to work their virtual reference desk a while back, but haven't really felt comfortable enough with SL to dive in. I think this class will help me get up and running.

Newly Discovered

The Library of Congress has a cool website to go along with their exhibition, Cartoon America. You might also be interested in browsing through their webcasts on all sorts of topics and feature many well-known authors and other public figures.

A Ray Charles Library is in the works.

For more mashups of books and multimedia, check out VidLit and KidVidLit. I also happened upon Bookshorts today - so far, not a whole lot of content, but it'll be interesting to see where it goes.

A Cornucopia of articles

I saw so many interesting articles today that I want to mention:

First, there's this article based on a study done at the University of Chicago about emails in which the authors talk about why misinterpretation of email "tone" is such a frequent phenomenon. It's basically a problem with egocentrism and the inability to step outside of oneself to see how someone else might see things.

Then there's this post about a fiction writing workshop and related book titled Writing the Other: A Practical Guide. It's basically intended for writers who want to create believable multicultural characters. Whether we think authors are able to write outside their ethnic heritage is a topic we are discussing in class this week.

Speaking of multiculturalism, there's this interview with Carrie Young Costello, author of Professional Identity Crisis: Race, Class, Gender, and Success at Professional Schools .

Library students might be particularly interested in this article: Electronic Portfolios for whom? The author suggests that at this time, they seem to be more about meeting administrators' needs than students'.

And, just for fun, you might like to check out some info on Songbird, a new media player built on the Foxfire platform that works similarly to iTunes but has none of those nasty DRM files associated with it.

emusic.com

When I saw the offer in my new issue of Paste Magazine for 50 free songs via emusic, of course I was intrigued. When I saw on emusic's homepage that additional songs would cost .25 each, I thought, hey that's better than iTunes! I should have known it was a bit too good to be true. My first inkling - this offer sounded strangely similar to this one I picked up from compusa, except the latter was offering 50 more free songs. Okay, what's the catch? There are a few significant ones. One, you are signing up for a free trial to this service which will, after your free 30 days, charge you between 9.99-19.99 a month, regardless of whether you download anything or not. Two, although you are free to "cancel at any time," you must do so in writing. And guess what? Three, there's no address listed anywhere in the terms and conditions.

Thanks but no thanks.

New tunes

I am discovering some great new-to-me ambient artists through SomaFM's Drone Zone, a streaming radio feed without commercials. This is like the radio station I've been looking for for the last 3 years. I love to listen to ambient music when I'm studying and sometimes when I'm drifting off to sleep. Their Groove Salad is also cool - I discovered this through their little podcast on iTunes. Anyway, I just had to share my latest joy. :) This is clearly a work of love.