for more than a year, i`ve been playing with one of the coolest electronic toys, it`s called iscrobbler. it’s is a plug-in that keeps track of the songs played by your favourite music player and posts them to a server. it works on a variety of players on a number of platforms and is still free.
but you`re probably wondering what is the point of having another bit of info about you online; as side from the cool shit like that RSS menu on the right side of this page [near the top] that shows the music i`m listening to pretty much as it happens without any diddling by me; is hosted by a site called last.fm
last.fm is a personal radio station. i have close 30Gb of mp3s, i don`t feel like taking the drive with all this music to work everyday and i`d rather not put my entire music collection on my work computer either, last.fm is like having my mp3 collection with me, without the stress and a few surprises.
over the last 13 months i`ve submitted close to 9000 tracks to last.fm, so they have a pretty good idea of my musical tastes and even if you don`t have the time or the inclination to go through all that trouble you chose three artist you`d like to hear and they`ll find you a station.
unlike other radio streams you can skip tracks you don`t particularly like, you can click the love button if you`d like to hear more of the same and there is a ban button for songs like the ketchup song that you wish to never hear in life again.
AS and last.fm have gotten a lot of press in the last couple of weeks in wired but their servers are up and running strong and sign ups are open. JS-development implemented my rss feed and had mentioned making it accessible for the rest of JS users but at the time, AS wasn`t accepting new sign ups. i don`t know if this feature will be accessible to all JS users in the near future now that everyone can sign up for an account.
[edit based on a comment i received]
i should clarify, last.fm doesn`t host or share music, they facilitate the sharing of music streams with people similar musical tastes as you self or based on your selections. the only file you ever receive from them is the initial file that allows your mp3 player to connect to their servers.
