Mashups

First time I heard the term mashup was in the music world in 2004 when DJ Dangermouse combined the music from The Beatle's White Album with the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album to create The Grey Album. Copyright infringment? You bet! Check out the YouTube video- crazy, huh?

Anyway, the mapbuilder mashup is quite handy- I added the Lakeview Branch of Madison Public Library to the map. Yea! I'm particularly fond of the Cambridge library's Hot Titles Carousel that links to their online catalog - it's so common for people to know a book (not to mention judge a book!) by its cover.

YouTube

How about a YouTube video that shows me how these lovely Parisian goodies were made? You Tube is great- you can find a video on just about anything. Maybe I won't find out how these were made, but there are lots of other great cooking related vids. Here's a clip of one of my favorite cooks, Alice Waters, talking about eating locally and farmers markets.
It's never crossed my mind to use YouTube as a reference tool, but it makes complete sense. We all know how to find the text of JFK's famous inauguration speak, now it's that easy to find the video as well...

Screencasts

I've always been a fan of screenshots when I'm learning how to do something techy for the first time. Screencasts are a nice extension or continuation of screenshots. In todays ultra visual world, it makes sense for libraries to use this technology to create tutorials for their online catalogs. For example, I think a screencast tutorial for using LINKcat at South Central Libraries would be much more useful than the "help" tab.
I'd like to test this idea with Screencast-O-Matic. To be continued...