18th February 2007, 09:15 am
18th February 2007, 08:13 am
Looking for educational podcasts? Check out Ed-Cast.org , a site devoted to listing podcasts related to higher education.
Podcasts are searchable by keyword. Further, you can limit your search by format (audio or video) and by length (0-15 minutes, 15-30 minutes, etc.) There’s also a “Show All” button, which I recommend using as there’s a limited number of podcasts available that I could find (about 40.) Search results are presented in a table that includes title, category (format, presentation, interview, etc.), length, keywords, authors, and date of submission.
Click on the title of the podcast and get a page of detail, including abstract, Creative Commons license, and contact information. Doesn’t look like any of the podcasts are hosted on Ed-Cast.
There’s an RSS feed available for the latest podcast submissions; look beneath the search form for the icon. A great idea and what podcasts I found seemed to be high-quality, but it would be great to see more here.
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
18th February 2007, 08:12 am
Well, they don’t aim low, do they. Microsoft has announced the public beta of a video sharing Web site called MSN Soapbox. Notice the word “Live” is nowhere in the title of this property.
The front page of the site is framed so it’s a little hard to see everything at once. You can browse most popular videos or explore a (rather anemic) tag cloud. Navs on the left also allow you to browse recently-added videos, most-commented, top-favorites, top-rated, etc. The videos are listed with title, thumbnail, and a couple of bits of information depending on how you’re viewing them (number of comments, star rating, when it was added to the site, etc.)
I must say I like how this is laid out better than YouTube. Click on a video and it loads at the right of the screen instead of going to a new page. Information about the video is contained in several tabs beneath the video, including comments, details, tags, and information on embedding a video into your Web site. (This tab also contains the direct link to the video, which is necessary because the frames make it otherwise difficult to get a direct URL.)
If you don’t want to browse videos, you can also do a keyword search. Keyword-based RSS feeds are available — look for the AMAZINGLY TEENY RSS orange logo in the top right corner of the search results. There are also feeds for the popular categories.
To upload a video or add comments or flag a video as offensive or basically do anything but look at videos, you’ll have to have a Windows Live ID. For additional information about the site there’s a FAQ as well as a blog . I like the layout of the site and the load time, and the RSS feeds for the results (though I wish they were a little more visible.) If you like YouTube, take a look.
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
