tfl: The Flatiron Life

Every Wednesday night Joscelynn comes home from marketing class and we conduct our own discussion group for the class. The class sounds amazing but Jos is worried that the professor does not think she is participating because the professor says exactly what Jos is thinking as she is thinking it.

Last night, Jos came home and told me about Pandora. Pandora is a music player with a mission, “To help you discover new music you’ll love.” Enter a song or artist you like. Pandora will then play a song by the artist. Then it will play a song that is like the one you just heard. If you really like or dislike that song, tell Pandora. Then it will play another song. Rinse and repeat.

Pandora is built off of The Music Genome Project which is

assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Using Pandora is amazingly easy. The interface is a very slick Flash application. The quality of the music is amazing. As you listen to and rate the music you are building a station. Sign up for an account and you can listen to this station anywhere you like. You can have up to 100 stations!

We are not talking just indie music or old music or just one type of music. This seems to be all music. I am building alternative rock, country, hymn, and Christmas stations. There are a couple drawbacks that do not bother me much. Pandora cannot play the exact song you request and you cannot go back in the list. The first is due to the way their licensing agreement works and the second is probably a symptom of the first. You can pause the current song and skip the current song, with no delay for loading.

They can do all this legally because they have a licensing agreement. A licensing agreement that I am sure is not cheap. So how are they turning a buck? First, there are ads on the site and the promise to add more ads as needed. Second, there is a pay version where ads are removed, only $36/year or $12/quarter. Third, they provide links for you to buy the music from The iTunes Music Store and Amazon. I imagine there are kickbacks in there somewhere.

Check it out, digg it, and love it!

After looking around more at Blingo, you can add friends. If you or your friend win a prize then both of you win the prize! So I have added a button to the sidebar and to this post so you all can add me as a friend.

Chicago Tribune has an article talking about Blingo, which is a front-end to Google, but with prizes. This reminds me of iwon.com but does not appear to be as evasive. It doesn’t appear look like you have to log in, just search like you normally would at Google. Then, by chance you win a prize. It can’t hurt to use it.

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The Washington Post has created a project called The Votes Database. It contains all the votes for the U.S. Congress back to 1991. It allows you to see how congress is voting and breaks down the numbers. The votes for a bill can be sorted by party, state, region, baby-boomer status, gender, and astrological sign. It also shows how individual Congressmen voted and how that compares with the party lines. They also have an RSS feed of recent votes for the whole congress and feeds of the votes for individual Congressmen.

You can use all this information along with Thomas to see if you representatives represent you.

There are also some fun aggregations on the front page. You can see who has missed the most votes in the House (Rep. Leonard Boswell) and Senate (Sen. Jon Corzine). Some others are vote margins and bills that received the most and least votes.

I have setup this page for my district, Illinois’ 5th District, with Rep. Emanuel, Sen. Obama, and Sen. Durbin.

When Vegard Sjaastad delivered a pizza near the western Norwegian town of Aalesund, there was something familiar about the customer’s credit card. It was his card, and had been stolen the day before.

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