23 Things Done! Finished! Completed! Conquered! Mission Accomplished!

He's at the 40! He's at the 30! He's at the 20! He's at the 10! Touchdown!

Well, we have come to the end of our 23 Things and what a journey it has been! This was really fun and it was quite enjoyable to see the creativity of everyone's blogs.

It is hard to say what my favorite "Thing" is. The blog was fun to put together, and the image generators and mash-ups are great fun.

Although I had used or seen some of the resources before, I did not have a reason to use them until now. I must say, hands-n experience is a much better learning tool that simply looking around a site.

There has been a great number of new resources available that I did not know about before this program that will be a great help in the future (and now).

My only suggestion would be include more blog providers and not just Blogger. This goes for some of the other "Things" besides the most popular sites like Flickr and YouTube. Maybe move the list of Web 2.0 Award Winners as an earlier Thing to see similar sites. Lastly, I would like to see listservs added to the list of 23 Things.

If there is another program similar to this one, I will definitely participate and encourage others to do the same. I think the fact I completed all 23 Things in less than two weeks shows how much I enjoyed the program.

Thank you again for giving us the opportunity to explore and discover!

Not just a book, an electronic AUDIObook!

Here we are with the second to last step (#22) and today we look at downloading audiobooks (eAudiobooks) from NetLibrary. This is a very nice site that includes a large number of eAudiobooks and eBooks.

I like that you can save an eAudiobooks information to a Favorites folder or send it via e-mail. You can listen to a short preview which is a nice feature. Another nice feature is the Similar Items list in the sidebar.

There are a lot of search options including browsing by subject, simple and advanced searches, languages, and you can search by a range of durations as well.

For anyone downloading a book, I highly recommend downloading the CD quality even though it is much larger and longer to download. The radio quality is very poor to the point that it is not worth the effort and time. It is too bad that there does not appear to have bookmarks when you listen to a book on the computer or on an Apple Ipod (not that you can listen to too many audiobooks on an Ipod).

Another eAudiobook site to check out is OverDrive, though this site requires downloading the program to your computer. However, one advantage of OverDrive over NetLibrary is the ease of moving audiobooks to an MP3 player.

Casting for Pods: podcast directories

For step #21 of our 23 Things, we looked at finding podcasts through three podcast directories. And, I have added a fun podcast to my Blogline account which is connected to my "And now, some real news" links located at the bottom on the left sidebar. Just look for Washington TravelCast. I know, it sounds silly to live this close to Washington, D.C. and have a podcast about traveling in our nation's capital. But, I enjoy hearing about a lot that is offered in the city that many people take for granted. Plus, there are sites (physical locations, not websites) that I have not visited and may sound quite interesting in the podcast.

Anyway, here are three podcast directories that I explored.

Podcast.net This is the site I used to find the travel podcast I have in my bloglines account. It is set up as a directory which is easy to use, but you cannot search within the categories. You can browse tags and you can search Title & Description, Keywords, Location, Host, or Episodes. Unfortunately, you cannot sort your search results either and the sidebar displays the most recent episodes of everything (I don't see the point unless what is listed is the podcast you want).

Search results allow a small summary and plenty of detail when you click on a search result. But descriptions are very brief if you use the directory only. You can sort by newest or alphabetically and the brief description includes category/categories, latest episode, author, and nothing else.


Podcast Alley is another site using the directory format, but only after choosing the "genre" from a pull down menu. On their homepage, between all those ads, they have the Top 10 for the month with no descriptions making it pretty much worthless. They also list five featured and five newest podcast, all without descriptions making them as useful as the Top 10.

One nice feature about Podcast Alley is that you will get a brief description in the same page each time you click on a podcast in the list. There are quick links for Subscribe, Vote, and Details, but I did not see where you can sort the list like you can in Podcast.net. Like Podcast.net, you cannot search within the "genres" and Boolean does not appear to be a feature.


Yahoo Podcasts is probably the best of the three. You can search Series, Episodes, or both. There is a section of Most Popular and Highly Rated podcasts with a very brief summary and links to listen or subscribe and a note on whether the podcast is free.

There is a section for Main Categories, but these are not a directory, but simply lists the podcasts with a good amount of description. Also, there is an additional search option to Search the Web that will take your request and search from Yahoo's main page. This search option will look for all results, not podcasts only. There is a section for Popular Tags in a tag cloud format.

The amount of description upfront and the amount of description in the search results is why I think it is the best choice of the three. However, I would recommend downloading Apple's ITunes for free to search podcasts. The usability of Itunes appears to be far superior to any of the three I reviewed.

One more "Thing" exercise and a summary to go and then I will be finito!