Apps & Sites Worth Revisiting

I would like to revisit some web sites and applications that I now lean on even more heavily than when I first recommended them:

Magnatune In Transcending Words (and copyright!) I recommended Magnatune as a source of Creative Commons music-- pieces by professional musicians that you are free to use so long as you give attribution. Each day I get a "Free Song of the Day"in my inbox. These have added up to a wonderful collection of music from which to draw for my projects. I now go to this playlist regularly for my movies and slide shows. A majority of freebies are classical and ambient, but I have found some wonderful electronic and blues music too. Excellent stuff.

Garageband I only use one little piece of GarageBand-- its podcasting feature-- but I have lbecome so hooked that I will enthusiastically present a break out session on this feature at MAPSA. It is so elegant, yet so simple. Now I can mix and edit my own mp3 productions with ease. Adding a Logitech USB Desktop Microphone, has even further upgraded my podcasts.

PhototoMovie These days, I often I produce an GarageBand narraton and then drop it right into PhototoMovie. This is the best $50 I spent these summer. Another simple application (Do you see a pattern, here?), PhototoMovie allows the user to add jpegs to narration or music and quickly piece together a movie that can be shared on YouTube. I have now produced several, like the Werner Herzog Filmography (play a few seconds of it in order to listen for the Magnatunes theme music by Lawrence Cresswell).

iTunesU Go to the iTunes store and visit iTunesU with its plethora of free video and audio podcasts from Duke, Stanford, Yale, NY Public Library, Library of Congress, New York Metropolitan Museum, Holocaust Museum etc. Using PhototoMusic I produced this little iTunes Preview to insert into a Keynote presentation I will make in October to Mame36.

Twitter "Enough already about Twitter," you may say. After all, I sang its praises in Why Twitter? But I use it more heavily than FaceBook or any other social media. Since the summer institute, many fellow ADEs have joined. Furthermore, some of the savvier sports journalists in town have jumped in as well. I find myself checking for filtered tweets half a dozen times a day. An addiction? No way. The majority of my professional, sports and political reading now comes from blogs that are linked by Twitter or my Google Reader.

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"Summer Revisited for Hope" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Madmoiselle Lavender