By Martha Spizziri
ASBPE Web Editor

Still confused by RSS? Not sure what social bookmarking is or why people would want to use it? The folks at Common Craft can help you out. They’ve produced a series of videos (with amusingly low-tech — yet seriously effective — production techniques) that give simple explanations of these and other Web 2.0 concepts. None of the videos is more than four minutes long, so you don’t waste a lot of time finding out what you need to know. Each video covers the essentials: what the technology is, why you’d want to use it, and how and where to go to get started.

This video on RSS is just one example. Take a look.

http://www.youtube.com/v/0klgLsSxGsU&rel=1

They’ve also got an excellent video on social bookmarking, one on social networking in general (very basic), plus Twitter (does a good job of explaining what Twitter is, but I think Harry McCracken’s recent post on the PCWorld Techlog does better at explaining why you might want to use it). There are also films covering blogs and online photo sharing, and a useful one on wikis that illustrates how they can be used to manage projects. Oh, yeah — there’s also a video on zombies.