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WordPress has this “press it” thingy that lives up in the browser toolbar. Click it when you’re on a nifty page and it starts a wordpress post (in the same tab! beware!) which has the url of the nifty page in it. Like this:

Pandora Internet Radio – Find New Music, Listen to Free Web Radio

I discovered pandora yesterday and listened to it all day! It’s an amazing service. I adore it. Pick an artist or two and it starts a “radio station” for you in your browser. It selects songs by the artist(s) you picked, and adds songs by other artists that it considers similar in style. Every song, at any time, allows you to “thumbs up” it, in which case it knows you like it and it will tend to pay songs by that artist more often, or “thumbs down” it in which case the song stops playing and it remembers that you didn’t like it. You can ask “why did you play this song?” in which case you’ll get a popup something like this:

“Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features folk roots, acoustic sonority, majoy key tonality, melodic songwriting, and acoustic rhythm guitars.”

That was the popup for a Leadbelly song on my Pete Seeger station :) Now I’ll mark it “thumbs up” and I’ll get more Leadbelly in the mix. It already played me some Pete Seeger, a little Dylan, a Woody Guthrie song, and a couple of songs by artists I hadn’t heard of, two of which I really liked (Stan Rogers and Bob Gibson). You can “bookmark” a song or artist, and it’ll show up in your profile where you can listen to a sample of it, or buy it from iTunes or Amazon. Handy for remembering new and cool songs and artists! Bob Gibson’s “Erie Canal” is on right now. He’s obviously heavily influenced by Pete — who better to be influenced by? So I’ve bookmarked him and I can consider acquiring a cd of his later.

Pandora is SO COOL!!!!!! Also, it’s completely free if you don’t mind a few advertisements in the tab (and possibly audio ads later?) or $36/year for the ad-free version. Hmm, it’ll let me add my favorite songs, artists, or stations to my blog. Let’s see how that looks…