Pandora - Music Discovery Service

I've recently been working on a digital music project at MERL and happened to run across a link to this company/service on Jeff Jarvis's Buzznet. This is great stuff! Originally used for in-store music recommendations (you know the headphones you can use to listed to music at BestBuy) this recommendation technology is now available on the web to consumers from the Music Genome Project (a.k.a. Savage Beast Technologies) a venture-funded startup in Oakland, CA.

Pandora has a great initial hook. Using a nice Flash interface you enter an artist/song you like and the service comes back with a streaming "station" of songs that are similar to the artist/song you liked. As you listen to the stream of songs you can give them a thumbs up or down which should help in subsequent recommendations. You get your first 10 hours free (of which I am burning through quickly as we speak) then you are asked to pay a subscription of $36/yr.

If you like one of the songs you are hearing, Pandora makes it easy for you to buy the CD from Amazon or get the song from iTunes. I think Apple should scoop these guys ASAP to lock up this technology for iTunes. Right now iTunes is a great way to purchase music but it could use a lot of help on the "discovery" front.

Warning, if you think you are already spending too much money in downloading music then do not try Pandora!

Flickr adds Blog Support

Blue Sunfish
Originally uploaded by mjkboston.

I must have been asleep in July (or on vacation :-). Now Flickr makes it easy to post photos and text to your blog as I am doing right now to Blogger. This will also work with Flickr's "email-to-post" where you can have pictures you email automatically get relayed to the blog of your choice (only one). For Flickr users who also have blogs (a high % I'll bet) this is a tremendous convenience and will drive viewers back to Flickr.

Blogger Images - Finally!

I missed this announcement back in June when Blogger finally added some semi-easy to use mechanism for bloggers to add pictures called Blogger Images.



You would think with Blogger and Picasa under the same roof that Google could do a little better in making pictures something more than an afterthought! This is a small step in the right direction. It still isn't WYSIWYG so you are guessing what it is going to look like.

BTW, the photo above is an August sunset on Norway Lake, Maine.

P.S. You would think Blogger would add "blogger" and "google" to their spell checker dictionary!