Week 9, Things 21 and 22

Thing 21: Search tools for podcasts.

I am not very familiar with podcasts and I don't know anyone who listens to them. Podcasts, by my understanding, are basically recordings of radio shows, books, etc that can be played back on an iPod, mp3 player, or other device. Podcasts are basically TiVo for your iPod.

I first went to podcast.net and searched for "film," it came up with a number of podcasts so I picked an interesting one, Indie Film Nation, and added it to my RSS feed. I also searched for "spanish" and ended up finding quite a few podcasts that were in Spanish, aside from the usual ones that will teach you the language.

I went to podcastalley.com next, and clicked on the "Arts" category. I ended up with a Harry Potter fanfiction podcast, which was interesting. I can see what podcasts have to offer, but I myself am not buying into the hype; podcasts just don't interest me.

Thing 22: Overdrive/Project Gutenberg.

I was very disappointed with Project Gutenberg. I typed in 4 different authors who are pretty well-known and ended up with nothing each time. I am skeptical as to the reach of their collection if these authors were not available. Overdrive was a bit of a confusing site, as was NetLibrary. I felt kind of like they were trying to make it as hard as possible for me to locate books, especially NetLibrary. But since I would rather read a book than listen to it, this exercise was interesting but not really my kind of thing.