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The Best Music Services Part 4

One of the things that makes online music services more interesting and useful than your iTunes library is the aspect of a Music Community. Not only can you hear good music, but you can connect with friends and others who share your tastes. This allows you to socialize about your favorite artists and see what others think and listen to. I get a lot of suggestions for new music from the people in my online music communities.

This is the 4th article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

Let’s take a look at the types of community and social networking that each of these services offeres. (P.S. If you are interested in sharing musical selections with me, there are links at the bottom of the post.)

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology, Web Surfing community, last.fm, Music, music discovery, music services, music streaming, pandora, slacker.com

The Best Music Services Part 3

This is the 3rd article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

If I want to hear all of my favorite songs, I can just listen to the “My Top Rated” playlist in iTunes. One of the real values of a good online music service is the ability to turn you on to good new music that you DID NOT know about.

These days I find just about all of my bands from suggestions on my favorite services. Let’s take a look at how our players stack up on the issue of Music Discovery.

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology, Web Surfing last.fm, music discovery, music services, music streaming, pandora, slacker.com

The Best Music Services – Part 2

This is the 2nd article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

The best reason to use any of these music services is to have them send you great music. There are many different ways of determining what “you” will like. They all seem to straddle the line between art and science with a touch of voodoo thrown in. I have spent a lot of time trying to get a stream of good music out of all of these services. Let’s take a look at my mixed results. (Don’t forget to give your feedback in the pole and comments below.)

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology, Web Surfing ilike.com, last.fm, Music, music services, pandora, slacker.com, survey

The Best Music Services – Part 1

This is the 1st article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

One of the most important features of a streaming music service is reliability. All of the other stuff doesn’t matter much if the music keeps stuttering and dropping out or the site’s navigation flakes out all the time.

How Am I Rating this Category?

Interface and Navigation – How clean and usable is the interface? Can I quickly get into my playlists and stations? Does everything work; quickly and without hiccups?

Streaming Quality – When I click Play, what happens? 1 or 2 seconds, then music or do I get hypnotized watching a loading graphic? Does one song flow smoothly into the next or am I stuck in the waiting room?

How Did I Test?

I already use some of these services a lot, but I gave each one at least a half hour on my Desktop (Ethernet cable), Laptop (Wi-Fi) and my iPhone (over AT&T’s lousy 3G network). Let the games begin…

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology ilike.com, jango.com, last.fm, Music, music services, online music services, pandora, shoutcast, slacker.com, streaming music

Separating the Contenders from the Pretenders

There are a bazillion services out there that will stream music to you over the interwebs.  A few are amazing an then there are well…”the rest”.

Loading up a few hundred thousand songs and streaming them is not really that big of a deal. The “special sauce” is what adds real value to these services.

Let’s to take a look a some of the major players in this space to see how they all stack up.

The Contenders

I will be evaluating the following seven music streaming services.

iLike.com -enables fans to discover and share playlists, new music that matches their personal tastes, and concerts by their favorite artists. iLike offers retail links to iTunes and Amazon to purchase music, Ticketmaster to purchase concert tickets and Thumbplay for ringtones.

Jango.com  – Jango is a social music service that lets you create and share custom radio stations. It’s the easy way to play the music you want online, legally and free.

Last.FM – Last.fm is a music service that learns what you love.
Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like – and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.

MusicStrands.com – MyStrands’ Social Recommender is capable of automatically learning people’s tastes and how their preferences evolve over time. It can be used to generate real-time music recommendations.

Pandora.com – Together, ateam of fifty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound – melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics … and more – close to 400 attributes! They continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.

Shoutcast.com – SHOUTcast Radio offers thousands of free Internet radio stations from DJs and broadcasters around the world.

Slacker.com – Slacker is what radio was meant to be: personal, portable and free. Slacker attempts to deliver free personalized radio that is customized for everyone. Slacker combines the knowledge of the nation’s leading music experts from every genre and your own personal tastes to create the perfect radio stations for each and every listener.

If there are any that are missing, add them in the comments and I’ll try to cover them in a subsequent article.

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Media, Music, Product Reviews, Web Surfing ilike.com, internet radio, last.fm, music services, pandora, shoutcast, slacker.com

Capture Anything, Anywhere, and Recall it with Ease

When you have to create content for a living (here and my day job), you are constantly processing information. I am constantly looking for new approaches to capture the information and ideas during the day. The best tool that I have found so far is the note taking service Evernote.

Here’s how Evernote explains their service:

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

1. You capture the things you want to remember using what you already use—your Windows or Mac computer, the web, and your mobile phone.
2. We run everything through our recognition technology, and then synchronize it across your devices. You can then organize and tag the notes, if you wish.
3. When you want to find something, just search or filter and there it is just like you remember it.

Adding Information to your Notebook

You can install a desktop application on Windows or Mac computers and use their web interface on Linux machines. They also have a browser plug-in for Firefox and Safari that allows you to clip text and images from web pages and save them.

If you use multiple computers (work and home) with multiple operating systems, don’t worry Evernote will sync your notes to all of your devices instantly. No matter which device I’m using I can always capture any information and pull it back up. You can use a PC, Mac, and Phone (text, voice, photos).

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Movies, Podcast, Product Reviews, Productivity, Software, Technology, Tutorials evernote, evernote tutorial, Note taking, notes, Productivity, software tutorial

Increase Google Reader’s Productivity Using Greasemonkey Scripts

I use Google Reader to read through 200+ feeds that contain mountains of information. Google Reader does a great job helping me manage this tall task. If you do a little tweaking, you can turn Google Reader into an amazing productivity tool. Firefox allows you to add extensions to increase functionality.

One of the most handy extensions is Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a webpage works using small bits of JavaScript. There are thousands of Greasemonkey scripts available that help you get more from just about any popular website or service. I use a few scripts to customize Google Reader into more than just an RSS feed reader.

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Gadgets, Media, Movies, Podcast, Productivity, Software, Tutorials extension, feed reader, firefox, google reader, greasemonkey, Podcast, Productivity, RSS, script, software tutorial, tutorial

See How You Can Bring the Web Operating System to Life

Every so often I read about the Web OS or the Cloud OS, "When are we going to see the Web OS arrive?" In my mind, it’s pretty much here (with a few caveats).

 
A Web Desktop or webtop is a desktop environment embedded in a web browser or similar client application. A webtop integrates web applications, web services,  and applications on the local computer into a "desktop-like" environment. Web Desktops provide an environment similar to that of Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. It is a virtual desktop running in a web browser where data, files, configuration, settings, and access privileges reside remotely over the network. Much of the computing takes place remotely and the browser is primarily used for display and input purposes.

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Gadgets, Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Podcast, Productivity, Software, Technology, Tutorials, Web Surfing igoogle, integration, tutorial, web applications, web desktop, web operating system, web os, zoho applications

GM and Ford can use Palm’s Simple Plan to Save Taxpayers $30 Billion

I saw all of the videos from CES of the new Palm "Pre" phone this week. I was pretty impressed, to say the least. I was discussing it as a challenger to the iPhone (don’t say killer) with a friend at work.

We both came to the same Earth-Shattering conclusion. (more on that later)

First, a little history on Palm Inc.

Palm completely owned the PDA market space to the point that they were as synonymous with PDA as Band-Aid (brand) was with adhesive bandages. Windows mobile made a better OS and HP made a better device and there went that market.

Then, they came out with the Treo and single handedly created the "Smart Phone" category. It did so many things, but had so many annoyances at the same time. Even after a few iterations they still have not ironed out the dings that make the Treo annoying. Along comes Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Symbian and again, they’re an also-ran. These phone/OS combinations were tough enough competition, but then the iPhone comes out and destroys everyone.

So Palm has been scuffling around for the better part of a decade running a household name into the ground. They have not adapted or innovated their products in any way that keeps up with the pack. How many times have they been on the brink of death in the last few years alone?

What does Palm do in the face of this? Well they grab themselves a JesusPhone and a few of the Apostles that helped create it. Next they just break out the photocopier. They build something that appears to capture all of the splendor of the iPhone experience. That alone would have been a small miracle, but they didn’t stop there. They took a look at a few of the tiny knocks on the iPhone.

• Apple’s ridiculous closed platform (links to articles)
• Camera with no Flash or Video
• No physical keyboard
• Poor multitasking / task switching
• No copy and paste

They came up with reasonable solutions to these problems.

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Gadgets, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Movies, Product Reviews, Web Surfing auto bailout, bailout, Ford, GM, iPhone, palm, palm pre

Little Laptop with Good Features and Better Price

When price and performance must share in compromise, few laptops on the market readily answer the call of duty. When it comes to getting high quality at an affordable price, the Dell Vostro A860 Laptop
drives a hard bargain.

Dell Vostro A860 Laptop

An affordable option that will fit into any budget, the Dell Vostro A860 Laptop offers great mobility and connectivity for the individual who needs a little more versatility from a work computer. Recently offered at $349 through Dell as part of a late 2008 push, there’s arguably no better computer for your buck.

The Vostro A860 offers three upgrade packages for more user customization. However, no unnecessary trial software is in the mix to clutter the hard drive or the desktop. The amply spaced 15.1-inch widescreen LCD display offers enough room to view multiple tasks and projects, with the ability to stream media or DVDs on the standard drive.

Dell Vostro A860 Laptop — Tech Specs

The Vostro A860 comes with the Intel Celeron M processor and the Vista Home Basic Service Pack 1. The optical drive offers a 24x CD Burner/DVD combo, with the option to upgrade to an 8x DVD+/-RW drive.

The basic package offers users 1GB of memory, a 120GB SATA hard drive and the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100. Out of the box, the laptop is wireless capable, and includes the standard one-year basic limited warranty.

Dell Vostro A860 Laptop User Offerings

Ultimately, the Vostro A860 is perfect for transitioning from a desktop to a capable laptop, catering to those in need of the technological mobility. Aesthetically, the computer offers a low-profile look, without the overly glossy finish found on many black laptops. The full keyboard allows for maximized user efficiency and comfort, and with the four-cell battery, the weight is just over 5 lbs.

The only real drawback, when considering the unbeatable price, is the size and the power-pull of a four-cell Li-Ion battery. Yet, when reviewing the pros and cons, an under $400 price tag far outweighs any potential drawbacks to this entry-level laptop.

About the author: This article was provided by the editors from LaptopLogic.com. At LaptopLogic.com you can read more laptop reviews, check out cheap new laptops or get the latest laptop news.

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