Here’s something which may or may not interest you but for the hasbro addicted child that I was, I was overcome with glee when I found out about the live action Transformers movie coming out next year. Well, they finally created a website specifically for the movie and can be found here . I have seen various clips of the robots (autobots and decepticons for you experts) transforming and for all intent and purposes, doesn’t look too bad.
Daily Archives: June 16, 2006
Pandora Update – Free Backstage Pass!
I know, I know, I just posted on this awesome new music service a few days ago but they’ve added this new feature called Backstage that I think is worthy of another post.
If you use Pandora primarily to find new music you’ll like and not so much to listen to tunes 24×7 then you’ll love Backstage. Type in an artist and you’ll get a biography and a selected discography. From this page, you can create a station on your Pandora Radio, shoot an email to a friend about the artist or add the artist to your [Pandora] bookmarks for later use.
Want to go a little deeper? Click on an album. You get a great album summary and a complete track listing with samples of each song, a la iTunes or Amazon. And finally, the magic part – a listing of similar albums by other artists determined by the “genome” of the music. Check out my first post for more info on this.
Now here’s where this service gets really handy. You can click on each individual song and get similar music recommendations – all this based on the genome of that particular song. Different songs on the same album will yield different recommendations because each song is different in many specific ways, even on the same album by the same artist. This is great if you like one or two songs on an album and would like to find similar songs by other artists. From here you can also create a station on your Pandora Radio based on this particular song.
Pandora is so much more than a great new way to listen to music – I think it’s a yet-to-be-fully-realized tool that will revolutionize the music discovery process. I’ve added literally dozens of artists to my to-buy list which, honestly, has been empty for quite some time.
If you haven’t tried Pandora out yet I highly recommend it. Build yourself a station or two, listen to some great new tunes, and then head backstage. I haven’t had this much fun listening to music since I got my personal cassette player for Christmas when I was 10.
Oh yea – consider this an official warning – you will get lost in the Pandora database. I once had to hit my back button no less than 10 times to find out how I got myself to Oingo Boingo.
Welcome(s)!
Well, June 15th unofficially spontaneously became Introduction Thursday here at LIVEdigitally. I want to start by personally welcoming our handful of new writers on board, and thanking them in advance for their future contributions. This is actually my second foray at bringing in some external folks to participate here. The first time out we ended up with Jonas, Ryan and Ameer, all of whom were really great to have around. Unfortunately, it happened in a timeframe where I got so overwhelmed with the six jobs I held at my company that I pretty much vanished for a long while, and they decided to take on new things (which seem to go quite well, way to go guys!).
At Sling we finally expanded to have a large enough team that I could cut down to only working 3 or 4 jobs at a time. This, combined with my basic desire to write, got me kicked back into gear to pump some life back into the LD. And as my traffic reports show, a few folks out there noticed and the readership has grown. So I felt it was good time to build up the site a bit more, and to do that, I need some help. And while both my mom and dad have written a few comments on some of the articles I’ve written, it wasn’t quite enough for me.
So, it’s a long way to say “welcome aboard”, but I am (always) optimistic about increasing the breadth, depth, and quality of the content you find here. Expect a lot of new product reviews from the team, as well as their own individual rants and raves on the technology around us. I hope you enjoy their writing, and let’s see what they have to say!
ps – do you know how hard it is to find a picture of actual lemmings (the animals) on a cliff? couldn’t find anything that didn’t look like this: