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!

I could avoid TV, but I can't avoid YouTube

YouTube is a popular video sharing website. The amount of content is amazing, but can be frustrating when you are looking for a specific post and there are several versions. What I find especially frustrating is lack of descriptions such as language in the uploads. I really hate it when I go to watch a video only to find it is not in English (okay, I know that sounds shallow and ethnocentric of me, but I only know one language: American). Also, there is a problem with duplicate uploads from different people. Because of limited size to upload a video, some people have to create separate video to make one continuous video. If you search for the clips later, it is difficult to find the video from the same person. You wind up watching an overlap of some videos.

I like the options to send to a friend and post to a blog, but keeps users from downloading to prevent intellectual property issues. Though there are a few videos that violate intellectual property. Now that Google has bought YouTube, we will have to wait and see if mega-search engine Google cracks down on the violators.

Users can search for videos, select categories, channels, or communities. I find the Channels option nearly worthless. There are few channels here and the videos have no information to explain what they are.

A co-worker asked me how she could include a video into her blog, but not as a post. I was able to add a video from YouTube, but it really made a mess of the blog, so I included it in a post instead. Click here to watch an Italian Greyhound puppy attack a Tickle Me Elmo Extreme doll. It is pretty funny.

I can definitely see how YouTube would be a good place to include movies made in the library on how to do things like use self-check out machines, search the catalog, training on using databases, etc.