Techpaulogy

Streaming Music Showdown - Last.fm vs. Pandora

I've been researching online streaming music tools for a long time, and it usually comes down to Pandora versus Last.fm. Both are free online radio stations essentially, wrapped in rich feature sets. Here's the scoop on both:

• Last.fm is my favorite, as it has the greatest social media / social networking capabilities. You can listen to so much good music, tag it, rate, it, and share it with the music community. Here's my Last.fm music profile, where you can see the level of detail it's capturing and allowing users to play with. It tracks everything - plus it integrates with iTunes, Media Player, etc. It also makes super cool charts to add to your blog that are updated dynamically (see over on the right sidebar). AND, it has its own stand-alone software you can download. Pretty amazing tool. You should definitely check it out, and add yourself as my friend.
• Pandora is also great. It's more hyped in the media, but has a slightly lower list of functionality. Here's my Pandora profile so you can see what's available (more clunky than Last.fm). First off, it's only usable via a Flash-based player in your web browser -- no separate software. They did add social features last week, but with all the pop-up windows and a separate Flash player, it's kind of hard to navigate. Pandora also offers tools for your blog, thought they are less customizable than Last.fm. I applaud them for all the improvements, but until they clean up the experience, I am sticking with Last.fm.

There are also some other options worth mentioning, which are useful or new.

• Pandora.fm is a mashup of Pandora and Last.fm that I use while listening to Pandora. It lets you track your Pandora music in Last.fm. Pretty great way to get the best of both worlds (sometimes Pandora offers a better music selection and offers some new ways to discover music).
• Musicovery is the new kid on the block, but given that it's entirely in a Flash player the user e peirence and overall functionality are still lacking. But, it offers a pretty cool way to visualize your music discovery process. I guess that's where Flash comes in, as a way to very slickly visualize things for Pandora and Musicovery, but it really makes using all of the non-music features (sharing, charting, etc.) a pain.
• Yahoo Music Unlimited is different because you have to pay for it ($6 a month), but I wanted to mention it because it is my second-most used streaming music service after Last.fm. The cool thing here is that you can play ANY artist and ANY song, so you can build specific playlists or play whatever song you want, whenever. Great for DJ-ing parties... the limitations of all the internet radio players above is that you can't select specific tracks or artists due to licensing restrictions, you can only choose genres and see what you get. Other options out there include Rhapsody (more options, more expensive), Napster, and Virgin Digital. What I am really waiting for, however, is for Apple and iTunes to get into the music subscription space -- that would kill all the rest since right now none of the others sync with my iPod. Not sure what the holdup is, since iTunes has been so successful licensing everything else?

Super Easy Favicon Generator

I ran across the Favicon Generator website and it rocks! The site is so easy to use. Favicons generated here contain text instead of images in order to be descriptive, but are colored to be nice looking.

 

Comparing Conversation Trackers: coComment vs. Co.mments vs. Commentful

I've been meaning to keep better track of my conversations out in the wilds of the Blogosphere. There are few tools that let bloggers keep up to speed with their off-site conversations. The three most popular right now are coComment, Co.mments, and Commentful.

After a bit of testing, coComment came out on top. Here's why:

• Better blog integration. A little CSS and javascript, and there's a cool widget in my sidebar that lists all the conversations I'm having elsewhere. You can grab javascript from Co.mments, and an RSS feed from Commentful, but neither of them have built-in CSS like coComment, which lets me tailor it to my hosted blog on Typepad. Sweet.
• Better user interface. I like the on-site user interface of coComment more than the others. It collapses all the comments that aren't near your own, and let's you expand them as you see fit. Co.mments' is decent, and Commentful's is pretty sparse.

And now, I've enable coComment for all my blog posts so you can use it too (thanks to Typepad  for this being so dang easy to implement).

Holiday Travel Tools - Finding the Best Flight

The best time to fly, as I re-discover every year, is decidedly NOT during Christmas. This year, however,  I decided to get a little more savvy about the proceedings. Plus, I'm planning a trip to Vegas, so I needed to re-evaluate ways to work the system.

For the past few years, I've relied almost exclusively on Orbitz, sometimes comparing it against Travelocity and Expedia. They end up with pretty similar fares, so I usually stick to Orbitz. The only catch is that you can sometimes get cheaper fares direct from the airline websites, and budget carriers like Southwest and JetBlue aren't even included the aggregate searches (sidenote: I'm still undecided if this helps or hurts them in the long run)... So when I know a route is covered by these carriers, I also look it up on their sites (sidenote 2: maybe travel agents could somehow use this to their advantage, and offer services to find you the best deals on the myriad of non-aggregated carriers).

Anyway, this year I tried out Kayak.com, the newest of the online travel booking websites, which searches all the travel sites -- Orbitz and the individual carriers included. Overall, Iike the no-frills presentation (a-la Goolge), which also has great tools in the left sidebar to slice and dice your flight options after your initial search.

Paired with the historical pricing and future prediction information on Farecast, it almost makes me think I understand how airlines set their fares (other contenders for this feature were FareCompare that has a clunky interface, and FlySpy that is still only out of Minneapolis) to see details about ticket price trends over time.

Finally, both during the booking process and while I was traveling, I relied on FlightStats to check routes, track flights and generally get the 411 on PDX. You can also check your current flight status from your mobile phone, which is pretty cool.

This blog is powered by...

As I get to work on my latest blog effort, I want to give credit to the tools used in the process:

* SixApart's Typepad  is hosting my blog - it's a great management interface, and it even lets me post from my Treo while I'm on the go... like right now.

* FeedBurner helps me syndicate my xml feeds (RSS/Atom) across the Net, allows people to receive my blogs via email, and also lets me add flare (think Office Space) to my posts - digg and del.icio.us buttons in particular.

* Firefox lets you take back the web! Fewer security flaws, tabbed browsing, and great add-ons make this the clear choice for web browsers.

Connect With Paul

I've established profiles on a number of websites, both for business and for fun. If you are on these networks, please shoot me an invite:

* Del.icio.us - a social bookmarking site, where users tag websites to be saved and shared. It's more flexible than Internet Explorer Favorites or Firefox bookmarks because it's not hierarchical. You can give a website multiple tags. E.g. You could save this blog, tagged with "blog," "technology," and "business." Then, once sites are saved in del.icio.us you can syndicated them in all sorts of cool ways (link rolls, tag clouds, etc.).

* Digg - a social news site where users determine the content. Probably the most popular of its kind (others of note include Slashdot, Rojo, Reddit, Netscape, and Newsvine), users post news stories and others digg, or vote on, their favorites. Popular stories with the most diggs are pushed to the front page.

* LinkedIn - a business networking site (among others like Ryze and Spoke), it allows members to keep up with each other's skills, jobs, projects, and entrepreneurial pursuits. It's also a great source of leads for business partners and potential hires. I also use it just to keep in touch with my friends and associates.