Another music site

Image via Wikipedia

I came across this website, called StereoMood.com recently, but it does a good job of playing music by theme. I've been digging it lately. It's not fantastic for discovery, like hype machine is, but it has the benefit of playlists by 'mood', so you don't have to think for yourself.

No time for a full write-up, but it plays with limited lag, even at my office that seems to throttle anything that might help me enjoy my day. So, that's a big plus.

Related articles by Zemanta

• StereoMood Plays Music According to Your Mood [Music] (lifehacker.com)

Hype Machine: Just let music bloggers influence you!

There are a bunch of music sites trying to introduce you to new music and stream it to you for free. They use algorithms based on the characteristics of the music (Pandora), on what your friends like or on what people you don't know but who like the same musician also like (last.fm). There are a bunch of others, too (like tumblr, 8tracks, Shazam with its iPhone app, and SeeqPod).

There are also a lot of people deliberately trying to influence your taste in music. Tons of them are blogging about songs they want you to like. Hype Machine pulls these blogs into one place so you can let these bloggers be influential. You can listen to the music, and if you want to read the review, you can click through to read the blog post.

I'm not sure what the legal requirements for them are, but these bloggers write about songs and add tracks to their posts. I'm guessing some get taken down and a lot are remixes (which may help avoid some copyright issues?). But you can listen to the site like a radio station, add songs and blogs to your favorites (and tweet about it) and connect with friends, or you can click through to buy the track from Amazon, eMusic or iTunes (which is how they make money).

What's great is that right now, they're rounding up the top 50 artists, albums and songs of 2008 and releasing them over the course of this week. The 2008 Zeitgest is available here, powered in part by imeem, and embedded below. Though, not all albums are streaming full versions of every song from imeem.





I'd love to know what music sites you use. I'm bballan on basically all of them, so hit me up with a friend request.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Pandora Versus Last.fm: Features, Interface, Applications Compared
• SeeqPod, a way to search for music and video on your mobile phone
• Twones: A Social Music Feed
  
• 40+ Free iPhone Music Apps
• Save Money on MP3 Purchases (or Find Them for Free)

Share the internet without emailing links! SocialBrowse

I stumble on a lot of interesting articles, web services and other websites. I don't email them around to people all the time because I don't want to be a bother and clog up inboxes. So, I share on google reader and del.icio.us/bballan. I think this allows people to selectively pay attention to me. My only problem is that all of these services are one-way streets, I have no idea what other people are interested in.

I've recommended del.icio.us, google reader and social median as good services for sharing what you're reading with friends (see here, here and here).

It's hard to argue against the value of social recommendation sites. The major problem with them is getting friends use them. I share invites with the hope that some people will get involved. With that in mind, there is a new browser plug-in that can help you discover and share cool websites. It's for Firefox only (but you should be using Firefox 3 anyways).

This new service, socialbrowse, got a great review from Techcrunch. I've got 10 invites to share and am offering them up free to anyone who leaves a message in the comments. (Leave your email address in the form, it doesn't get published, except to me).

This plug-in falls short of getting a discussion going among friends, but it gives points based on the popularity of shared links among your fans, which will at least make it clear what people find interesting. At the very least it can get us sharing links and discovering interesting new things. So, jump on board.

Getting Calendarized

I almost always write about using the new tools of technology to improve your life. I also have written several times about smartphones. I think they are fantastic. Even regular phones have tons of features that are overlooked on a daily basis.

One of the most useful functions that I have recently embraced is my calendar. For as long as I've been getting homework, I've needed to remember it. I generally did OK without writing most of it down because I had daily reminders from teachers and classmates to prevent me from forgetting to do the work. In college, all assignments were posted to the class website and given out on the syllabus well beforehand. Now, in real life, I have real events to keep organized and no one to remind me about them. There are all kinds of events: meetings, dinners, drinks, gallery openings, plays and, my favorite, birthday parties.

To keep track of all of this, I use Google Calendar (of course). I use it because it is integrated into my email and it is pretty easily integrated and synced with my Blackberry. Google Calendar is also integrated with Jott (which I wrote about recently) and Remember the Milk, which I use sporadically to organize my todos (mostly grocery lists, though). I also really like this fbCal facebook app that imports all my events and friend's birthdays to Google Calendar (I read about it here).

With all of this, I'm still not fully organized in my personal life. But, I think I've discovered some powerful, free tools that should help me make more progress and achieve more in my lifetime.

Do you use a calendar program? How do you keep in sync? I'd love to hear what my friends are doing. Reading what people who are professionally organized for a living do is more beneficial to someone who rates higher than a 3 out of 10 on the organized scale. So, let me know in the comments. And get more information about the wonders of Google Calendar here.

Coming Home

Justin Bias, one of the up and coming stars of tomorrow just released his debut album, Coming Home. I've gotten my hands on an advance copy and already ripped and posted it to the internet on another cool website, called muxtape. It's literally a website where you can go and create mix tapes.

There's even another website, called muxfind that helps you search for people with taste similar to yours (assuming you posted a muxtape).

Anyways, go check out Justin's work. Then, when you decide you like it, go pick up a copy!

Unfortunately, you'll have to get a physical copy rather than download it because Justin is totally indie (as in independent) so you can't get it from the Amazon music store or iTunes, yet. One day, distribution could be centralized. That is, after the labels figure themselves out.

Jott Update

I came across this link about a cool update to Jott. It integrates RSS feeds into Jott, by having Jott read your feeds to you. You know I'm a fan of this idea because of my love for RSS and for computers doing things for me. However, I'm not sure if I'll actually use it, given that I don't do much that would reqire listening rather than reading my feeds while on my mobile. But, again, Jott may be more useful for people with old school cell phones and cars rather than blackberries and subway commutes.

What do you think?

New News Aggregation Site

I have a few Alpha invites for a new news aggregation website called socialmedian. I haven't actually be using it as much as google reader. However, I will admit that the social aspects of socialmedian seem to have potential to be far superior to google reader.

Anyways, if you want in, just post in the comments here and I'll send you an invite code. I think if we get a bunch of people we know on there, it could be really cool. Think I'm making it up? Remember when I got you pre-invited to Hulu?

New Features

Friends, you may have noticed that I've added a few more items to my sidebar. One is a quick view of my shared items on Google Reader (which I love, but you knew that already). I also added two things related to del.icio.us (which I praised here). The first is a sidebar item with my most recently bookmarked items. The second is an RSS feed to my most recently posted del.icio.us items. I thought this feed would be interesting for two reasons. First, it lets me easily share items with everyone regardless of which feed reader you use (and I have to assume that no one is using Google Reader because I have no new friends). Also, I think that I read a lot of interesting stuff and rather than email it out to people and feel bad about sending around a bunch of stuff no one is interested in, I can have this feed where people can choose how and when to consume it. I think you might be able to create your own feed from my bookmarks based on the tags by adding /'tag' to the end, but I'm not sure.

Hope you take advantage, and if you set yourself up with a del.icio.us account, let me know so that I can get into your network.

Sharing is Caring

Ok, I tried to get you on Google Reader, but you weren't interested. Only one person took me up on it (thanks, Sach).

What is it that you people don't understand? Isn't it clear that the internet is powerful? Isn't it clear that there is too much information for each of us to deal with on our own? Isn't this why people send around articles to their friends?

A common 'meme' (to use the parlance of our times) is that "news that is interesting will find me." I agree with that. However, it helps to have a living, breathing social network to help disseminate that news faster. It also helps to harness the power of the internet. We're living in an age of unprecedented innovation, with very useful free services being created every day. If we don't take a look around, we might be left behind.

I keep up with the world around me by using Google Reader and sharing posts (if you were my 'friend', you would have gotten an invite code to a new service today). I also use del.icio.us. Previously, I recommended instapaper, and I still do for news articles and the like. In that same post, I even said that I never really got into delicious. Well, that's changed. I'm now using it to keep my bookmarks organized.

I LOVE tagging as a mechanism for organization. You just give a couple of one word descriptors for each bookmark and you can always find your bookmarks in a given category. Go check out my bookmarks. You'll immediately notice that I've bookmarked a bunch of websites about apartment and others with cool productivity tools.

The next benefit of delicious is that its a web service. As you may recall, I'm enamored with web services. I love having access to my email, feeds, bookmarks , etc from any computer with an internet connection (which is by the way almost all computers and many cell phones). In this case, I find that its useful to have access to my links from work, home and sometimes a friend's computer.

Now, if only some of my friends would get on these web services with me, I'd have access to a much richer world of information and entertainment. Imagine if you had never heard of youtube or facebook or hulu. I'm just here giving you some of the tools that make the social web more interesting. Take a look at the 'Follow me to..." box on the right side of this page to see some of the services that I'm using/trying out. There's obviously a lot more out there than this, but I think it's a pretty good start. Let me know what you think in the comments.