Create your own radio station

Last.fm was recommended to me by my lecturer Jim. It's another one of those sites like pandora where you can create your own radio station, but it's a bit more advanced.

You have to register before you can listen. And unlike pandora you don't have to live in America to be able to. You have to download a programme which sends the songs you listen to on your computer to last.fm. This forms your "profile" which other people can view and also so it plays the music you like. You can also create your own radio station (again like pandora) by typing in a band you like, and they will play similar music. You can say if you love a song or to ban a song. You can also do all sort of things like add tags to songs, join groups and listen to other peoples stations.

Took me a little while to get to grips with it but great for music lovers I'd say.

Don't Panic!

In my post the other day I mentioned Panic! At The Disco dot com. I thought I may as well do a little review.

First you come to an advert for their current US tour, and you have to click a link (which isn't immediately obvious) below it to enter the actual site. It takes a little while to load but why it does you get an animation type thing as if you're going up in a lift. Once it does load you enter a 3D "living room".

It took me a little while to realise how you get anywhere. There's a little box near the bottom of the page where you have to type in a destination, and you can hover over the "?" next to it to see where you want to go. Once you type in a destination and press enter, it takes you on a little tour of the apartment to get there. You have to hover over things to see if they do anything and not everything listed does. The site is very high-tech and looks good but I found it hard to find any of the actual content.

Is comment free?

Generally blogs are just a place where people write down what they've done that day or how they're feeling, I for one have an online journal. But some people use them for different purposes. For example this blog was started as part of a uni module to help develop my online journalism skills. But can they be used to talk to the mainstream media?

Many a well established journalist has been brought down by bloggers. Dan Rather was an American news anchor on the CBS Evening News. In 2004 Dan made public some documents concerning president George Bush's Texas Air National Guard service. These documents were later found to be forged after much ctiticism from bloggers such as RatherGate. Dan took early retirement a few months later.

So journalists beware, bloggers are after you!

Although plenty of journalists have blogs too these days. The Guardian has just started a blog called comment is free. And this was based on Adrianna Huffington's Blog at the Huffington Post. So could blogs soon be an as popular as the main stream media? Who knows.

Blog again.

Now last week I said I was going to try and update more often. Unfortunately that didn't go to plan as I've had a busy week, but I am going to try again.

Although I have found out something about Pandora that I didn't know last week; after you've listened to so much music they want you to register to carry on listening. Fair enough cos you can still listen for free. One problem. You can only register if you live in America. If I'd known that I wouldn't have skipped all the tracks I didn't like.

On the upside I bought the Panic! At the Disco album A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, today. I wasn't sure about buying it just from hearing one song as it seems pointless having an album you don't really like. But after hearing more of it at the weekend I thought I would like it. And Luckily I do. It's full of songs with really long names such as There's a Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered Honey, You Just Haven't Thought of it Yet.

The sticker on the front of the CD case says:

Panic's catchy melodies are quite literally some of the most likeable songs you will hear all year. . .

which was taken from Spin.com. I'd agree with this. Although the songs are all pretty short (in time not title) they are all catchy. I'd like to tell you they sound like someone to give you more of an idea what they sound like but I can't think of anyone because they're fairly unique. Their MySpace page describes their music as rock/big beat/techno. Take from that what you will.

One more thing, they have a pretty interesting website. Take a look.

Picture taken from amazon.com

Rathergate!

Who is Dan Rather?

Many websites started up at the time when the George Bush story emerged, including: RatherGate and Rather Biased.

Also see this blog and these posts from Little Green Footballs: Bush praises blogosphere, Old pros tricked by blogs and Liberal journalists are from Mars…?

Interesting music sites

Firstly, Karen suggested Pandora to me last week. So I checked it out and I think it's a really good idea for a site. Basically, you type in a band or a song you like and it finds similar songs and adds them to a "radio station".

It even remembers previous radio stations when you return to Pandora (from the same computer). And if you don't like the music it plays you can tell it so and then it doesn't play that song again. A great way to find new music similar to what you like. Thanks Karen.

I also stumbled across another site. It's basically one of those sites that features lots of lists of other websites, so not necessarily a true website in itself. But its got links to everything to do with music you can think of: artist sites, instruments, news, reviews and even history. Could come in handy.

If anyone knows of any other good music sites, let me know. I'm going to try and start updating more too.

Links

I've put up some new links in my links bar. Check them out if you've got a spare minute or so.

Are lectures really necessary?

When you can just watch Quizmania? Don't bother getting up early for your lectures, just stay up late and watch Quizmanina instead. All students are talking about it. And you can win money too. However, I've watched it once and none of the answers I thought of were right, and then I got bored.

Could Germaine Greer be right? We should all just have our lectures on DVD. At least then we'd be able to have them whenever we wanted and have a lie in after being up watching Quizmania until stupid o clock in the morning. Because let's face it, we've all done it at least once.

Student TV is back! The presenters might be really annoying but it's strangely addictive once you start watching it and you just have to carry on watching to find out what the answers are! ITV are even launching their own channel dedicated to quizzes and call ins. So it must be popular then. That'll be all the students.

I prefer Deal or No Deal myself.

Back to music. . .

So I thought a good way as any other to find new music was on MySpace. So the other day I decided to search MySpace music for something good. I came across Panic! At the disco. A lot of my mates have been talking about them lately and I know my brother likes them so I thought I'd check it out. The song The Only Difference on their profile is pretty catchy and quite funky. Different to what I'd normally listen to but I like it. Just don't tell my brother that.

And yes I'm a little bit addicted to MySpace, sad I know.

What is the world coming to?

Or rather America. Thanks to the Daily Mirror I found out that James Blunt has gone to number one in the singles chart (and his album top 5) in the States. Surely they have more taste than that? I know, I know, each to their own and all that. But did it have to be with that song? I'm just glad I'm not there and don't have to put up with it being over played - probably the reason I dislike it so much.

On a more serious note, talking about this whole "biggest burglary in Britain". Also in the Mirror today there was a story about that. It says that they've found £30m of the £53m that was stolen from the security deopt in Kent. I guess this story interests me as I'm from Kent. And I think someone my brother knows works there.

Also it's interesting because at first they thought the robbery was carried out by experienced robbers but it doesn't seem that way anymore. They may have got away with it in the beginning but it doesn't seem like they will in the long run. It seems they've already caught some of them, let's hope they all get caught soon. Scary stuff.