I recently found a couple fascinating free web sites. These sites have become an integral part of my life and they certainly exhibit the best of what the Internet can be.




pandora.com is labeled "internet radio" and lives up to that billing. Pandora allows you to type in the name of a song or an artist and then creates a radio station that plays music similar to the song or artist you typed in. You can add additional songs and artists to further define the station. You can also give each song a thumbs up or thumbs down to further define the station. You can define as many stations as you want, and you can use the QuickMix feature to listen to any mix of your stations. It's totally free and has just about every song that ever got any radioplay anywhere. They also constantly add new music from even the most obscure garage bands. So, in addition to hearing old and new songs that you love, you'll also be exposed on a daily basis to new music that fits the parameters you've defined for your station. For example, this morning I've heard about 10 songs, and 4 of them have been by artists I've never heard of. Pandora lets you check out bios and history for each artist and provides direct links to buy the songs.

I have stations for Indie Baroque, Ethereal, Pop, Rock, 80's, 70's, Oldies, Country, Soul, Christmas, Classical, and more. Depending on my mood, I use the QuickMix feature to put together a combination of music I want to hear for the day. I listen at work on headphones, at home connected to my stereo speakers, and even on my wife's iPhone in the car. Pandora works on quite a few cell phones with it's own application. They subsist on advertising, and optional subscriptions (which allow you to use the app ad-free).





bookmooch.com is a book trading service. You create an account, type in books you want to get rid of (using ISBN number or author/title), and then browse through tens of thousands of books being offered by other individuals. Add 10 books to your inventory and you are ready to "mooch" your first book from someone else. It works on a point system. The more books you add, and the more books you ship, the more points you get. Each point is worth a book mooch.

You can enter a little bit of information about each book's condition to give users an indication of what to expect. The only cost is when you go to the post office to ship books. You can ship via media mail, which is currently about $2.00 per book.  When browsing for books to mooch, you can search by book genre, by country of origin, by language, or just look through the inventories of individual users. Most members prefer for you to get a few books from them at a time in order to cut down on shipping and number of trips to the post office. Many users will even return a point to you if you mooch three books from them.

You can choose whether you wish to ship domestically only, or also ship internationally. Books shipped internationally earn you 3 mooch points towards new books.

I signed up for the service, added 40 old paperbacks, and received 15 mooch requests in the first two weeks. I have requested 10 books from others and still have a surplus of points to use on others. Since my daughters are learning French, I have been using this opportunity to get a few  authentic kids French books.