Web 2.0 Awards

This is a fun one. I found several sites I'd like to spend more time at, but the one I want to write about is Pandora. It's a very cool radio site where you enter the name of an artist or song you like, and it plays you other songs you'll probably like, based on the musical attributes of the artist or song you selected. Nothing to download, free. Probably uses a lot of bandwidth or whatever, so I guess I won't be listening to it after this, but surely an hour or so to test it out is ok. It's based on something called the "Music Genome Project,"which analyzed the musical attributes of thousands of songs.

I started by typing in They Might Be Giants, and first it played a TMBG song, followed by several others, and so far I've liked all but 2 of them, so it seems pretty good at matching my taste. As the song is playing, you can get info about the song, the artist, why it played this song (what musical elements make it similar to your selection), links to buy the music, and you can tell it that you like the song, don't like the song, you're tired of this song (it won't play it for a month). If you hit a song you don't like, you just click on "don't like," and it skips to the next song. So I guess as time goes by, it refines your taste more and more. Plus you find lots of new music you like!

There's a home player, which would be fun. So far I like this more than XM, since it's personalized and you can skip past songs you don't want to hear. I went and typed in Kate Rusby for a second "radio station," so you can have multiple stations to listen to. You can listen to other people's stations too. This is very cool. I imagine you can use this, especially with teens, in the library. The site is so easy to use, and you can explore the site without interrupting the music.