Sunday, September 24, 2006

Pandora: Friend of a Friend


Both of us should prolly have had our minds more on books -- or maybe we should've had more of our minds on books than we did have -- but as I have always said it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Anyway, I owe my introduction to Pandora to Chris Myers at Peter Lang USA. Chris gave me a bit of a spiel on the Music Genome Project and how it worked. It sounded like friend of a friend and I guess it is. Given ubiquitous wireless this could almost make yer iPod redundant, although it would mean remembering your headphones when you stepped out with music on your mind.

Based on the Music Genome Project, which maps the traits of music, Pandora invites you to establish a radio station on your computer. You feed in the name of a musician or group you like and Pandora plays one of their tracks. It then asks for guidance -- I like that song, play another like it; i don't like this one, this station shouldn't play music like that; why are you playing this track? -- and based on your response offers up another track. By way of your responses you build up a playlist, with options to bookmark the song, purchase for download to dump on the pod with itunes, and so on.

And there's the social software side as well. Build your profile, share your radio stations, profile, and so on. It could take up a lot of time.

Whoops, time away from books.

If you haven't spent a day or two with Pandora I'd be surprised if you regretted it once you have. Writing may never be the same again.

// posted by Colin and/or Michele @ 4:25 pm
Comments:
Come check out this new "toy" I'm playing with for browsing Pandora stations...

I describe it here.

http://pandoralicious.googlepages.com

Tim
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 10:47 pm
 
This user-friendly application is absolute genius! Sometimes I get bored with my own iTunes library (although with over 3 days' worth of music, I'm not sure how this happens) and Pandora is perfect for variety. Like satellite radio without the subscription fee. A mobility feature would be great!
# posted by Blogger RLP : 12:19 pm
 
There's also Last.FM which has a player and Pandora-like recommendation system...

http://www.last.fm/
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 12:51 pm
 
The mashup and alternative are brilliant. The kind of concrete stuff that shows the quantum difference between web 1 and web 2. I know it's a bit of fun in some places to laugh off web 2 as a cliche or a doomed to fail business model. But i guess while that laughing is going on there's a lot of 'new reality' being made out there. Well, for anyone with the power of access ....
# posted by Blogger Colin and/or Michele : 5:40 pm
 
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