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Read this article from boingboing.net and see if it makes you want to buy a movie from Amazon Unbox…

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/15/amazon_unbox_to_cust.html

Or maybe it makes you want to vomit, and then make sure everyone you know reads that article as well. Pass it on.

Forgot to give you my pandora profile:

http://www.pandora.com/people/kara00

What’s yours? :)

Did I mention that I paid for a yearlong ad-free subscription? Not that the ads were that bothersome, not at all, but mostly I just want to support these guys who, if they’re like any other internet startup, are probably losing money. Go, pandora, go!

I just noticed Pandora’s “edit station” function. (click the little triangle on your station name). This screen lists the founding artists/songs of your station. You can remove any that you’ve changed your mind about. You can also see which songs you’ve “liked” and “disliked” — again, you can remove them. (e.g. you told pandora you liked a certain song, then heard it a few more times and changed your mind about liking it!)

I listened to my Pete Seeger station all day yesterday and for a while this morning, and added a couple cds to my Amazon Wishlist! (Would have added more but many of the older, more obscure ones were not available. Sigh.) I just decided it was time for a change, so I made a station founded on Benny Goodman and Fred Astaire. Figured that should give me a nice mix of 30s/40s swing/pop. So far I’ve heard Benny, Fred, Nat, Bing, and John Pizzarelli (I’m not on a first-name basis with him, heh).

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…