Discovering last.fm

Last night I finally checked out last.fm after seeing it pop up in a few blogs I read. Five minutes after creating an account and seeing what the service was about, I was totally hooked.

You start by entering in the names of a few artists that you’re into. From there last.fm provides you with a list of like-minded users, and you can either listen to a streaming radio station based on their personal collection, or a station based on their profile. While you do it the system builds up your own profile and will enventually give you a list of ‘neighbours,’ whose tastes approximate your own. There are lots of other cool features too, like breakdowns of users by country (here’s Australia and Canada) where you can see the top artists and tracks. There’s also the Audioscrobbler plugin, which sends data to last.fm about what music you’re listening to, so that your profile can continue to be updated even when you’re not using the service.

The other aspect I’m really keen on is the public profile (here’s mine). One of the reasons I think I like it so much is because as long as I continue to use the service, it’s a dynamic snapshot of the music that I’m into. I can see that it could easily become one of the pillars of a dynamic web profile. Some more on this later.

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