Week 5/6 - Flickr

I will be charitable and thus describe myself as.... not photogenic. As a result, I have little use for such internets frippery as uploading pictures of myself for unsuspecting viewers to blind themselves with.

That said, I have used Photobucket (a less useful version of Flickr) before, and the ability to tag images is pretty cool.

Kids in Japan do this obsessively, apparently, since they all have cell phones with cameras in them (and television/radio pickup, and internet connectivity, and particle colliders, etc). They will take pictures of anything and promptly put them up on the internet. As panopticons go, it's better than Britain, I suppose. At least Japan has sushi and ramen.

Also Week 4 - Podcasts

Podcasts are seriously my favorite thing about my iPod. The times when I commute generally have nothing I'm terribly interested in on the radio, so I whip out my iPod, plug it into the car tuner I picked up, and listen to something interesting. Generally it's something like Astronomy Cast or The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, but I also listen to podcasts of talk or news shows that either don't air around here or air at stupid o'clock when nobody who keeps a sane sleep schedule can hear it.

I haven't made any podcasts myself at this point, though ideas for them keep occurring to me. Of course, I generally shoot them down within about 5 seconds for two reasons: 1) nobody cares about the topic 2) I don't feel like paying for the bandwidth if people DO like it.

Week 4 - RSS

RSS is one of those things I love, because I'm a certified news junkie. Once upon a time, I would set my computer up in front of the TV so that I could watch the 24 hour news channels. This was, of course, back when they actually carried news, as opposed to whatever drunken escapades Paris Hilton has recently gotten into. (C-SPAN remains a guilty pleasure.)

My problem, if you can call it that, is that RSS is TOO useful. I wind up biting off more than I can chew in terms of news intake, so entire feeds go unnoticed for days or even weeks on end. Laugh if you want, but this happens with me and podcasts too. There are only so many hours in a day, after all, and in theory I spend at least a third of them sleeping (Half Life 2 says otherwise, of late).

Gamer Trivia Moment: Those of you with a Nintendo Wii console (which is probably a pretty small number, given the likely audience for this blog) will of course know that you have an RSS reader of sorts built right into your Wii, in the form of the Wii News Channel. I probably had way more fun with that than most Wii users did. >__> Oh news junkies. We're so crazy.