The Sound of Music

Today we explore the world of online streaming music sites.

I have used Pandora several times before. The site begins playing music very easily and has a nice user interface, but if you have something in particular in mind it doesn't work that well. The review process can be fun in that you are given the feeling that your opinion has an affect on what will be coming up next.

Today I tried out FineTune. The idea seems nice, but the limitations make it a little less desirable. In FineTune you create your own playlist or you can listen to others. The limitations are that you can only have three of a particular artists work in a playlist. Also when I was searching the Beatles discography the songs in each album were listed, but not actually available. They have a lazy feature that will fill out the rest of a playlist if you don't want to do it yourself (which strangely put some Beatles songs on that had appeared to be unavailable). The design of the website also was not very intuitive, but had a very stylish look.

What I would like is a site that lets you do what you want without restrictions, but that would probably violate the record companies copyrights.

All the RSS

I have been using RSS feeds on my personal blog for a year or two now. My favorites have been Astronomy Picture of the Day (the source of many of the wallpapers on the computer), Unshelved Comic, Dilbert Comic, and the Daily Show with John Stewart. Anything that allows me to be more lazy or efficient I like. My personal blog is on LiveJournal and it has a convenient way to have a page that lists all your friends blogs, RSS feeds, and other communities of interest all on the same page. Bloglines seems to have a lot of features, but it's not very straight forward (which could be intimidating to people who just want something that will simply give them their updates). I sometimes find some RSS feeds to be a little overwhelming if they make more than five posts in a day (If you are subscribed to more than 10 feeds it can get overwhelming quickly).

The best uses for RSS in the library are update patrons on new databases, upcoming events, and new books (if there was a way to set a specific search option, like Google News Alerts, it could be really popular).