And these are a few of my favorite things....

One of the great things about blogging is that you can claim wandering round the web is not procrastination, its...research. Doing a community service by finding cool stuff for everyone else. So here's the results of some of my "research"

Noise Trade
Like new music, short on cash and don't want to take the illegal route? noisetrade.com to the rescue. How it works is you pay what you want for the album (you can pay as little as US$1) or if you tell 5 friends about the album you can get it for free. There is a great selection of music available. I've included 2 favourites below. You probably remember Sixpence none the richer from their smash hit Kiss me a few years ago. They've just released some new songs and noise trade is the only place you can get them. Alli Rogers is a great independant artist who sounds somewhere between Brooke Fraser, Norah Jones and Tina Arena. Other artists worth checking out include Phil Joel, Great worship songs, Jesse Butterworth and Jon Bauer

Ripple
Ripple.org provides a simple way to do good. By clicking on their site, money is donated to charity from the ads on the pages. They support some great causes. One of them is The Oaktree foundation who i volunteer for and think do an amazing job. The others are Oxfam, WaterAid and Grameen foundation. To make it easier i've added their widget to the sidebar of my blog so click it when you come to visit.


ChinesePod
Learning a language can be hard work but i've found chinesepod.com to be greatly helpful in my attempts at Chinese. There's over 1100 audio lessons on everything from basic greetings to how to explain you were abducted by aliens in chinese. Some of the content does cost to access but theres a lot of content, including all the beginner level lessons you can get for free and some of the subscription plans are good value. There's lots of friendly and helpful people in the discussion section. Also worth checking out is the Chinese culture show they produce called Dear Amber.