Last.fm

I discovered two rather wonderful new things, well they were mentioned on plasticbag.org and I paid attention this time. last.fm and Audioscrobbler

last.fm is an online radio station or I should say multiple radio stations as you can choose from what seems to be many thousands of music streams. The streams can be by tag, based on the collective taste of a group you might be in or your own personal radio based on what you listen to on last.fm or, and this is the clever bit through audioscrobbler a plug in that monitors what music you're playing on your PC it can build up a database of your taste. In a similar way, but I believe a tad more sophisticated, to how Amazon makes recommendations for purchasing. As the list of music that you listen to on your computer or one of the radio streams builds up it starts to make recommendations, through listing "musical neighbours" who will have similar tastes to you and what it plays on your radio station.

I'm still getting my head round how it all works, the FAQs and Help could do with a bit of expansion to cover every button that can be pushed and even though I'm viewing in Firefox the site sometimes looks awful as the google ads sometimes bleed over into a neighbouring section of the page. These are minor quibbles though, so far I think it is a lovely lovely thing. I've listened to the alternative, indie, trance and techno streams and joined a couple of groups. I can see last.fm seriously challenging Radios 4 and 5 for my listening time.

I like particularly like the radio stream by tag. Like flickr the tagging is done by the general public so occasionally get a weird one. I've been listening to the new wave stream and just had Outkast - Rosa Parks because someone has tagged it as new wave. Kewl!

If you want to mock my musical tastes here is a link to me. The other really cool thing about last.fm is that it's British and doesn't belong to either Google or Yahoo (yet). Oh and it's free.