My new project, Checkpanel, went into public beta recently. Checkpanel is a checklist application which focuses on repeating checks. Unlike traditional checklists, Checkpanel keeps track of all reported checks (marking something as working or not working). You can see who when last checked a test case and what the errors were. You can also let […]
internet
thesixtyone is a platform on which you can listen to and rate music and rate it. Musicians upload their music for everyone to listen to. If you like it, you can “bump” it, giving it a vote. The music which gets voted the most is posted to the front page. So basically, it works for […]
Some time ago I wrote about Using Firewalls to Fight Procrastination. But how do you know which sites to take out with your firewall? MeeTimer can help you there. This extension for Firefox logs in detail on which sites you spend how much time. You can then see in its stats how many work hours […]
Searching for new music is still a tricky business. In Discover New Music That’s Perfect for You, I once presented a few recommendation systems which adopted to the personal taste of the user. Critical Metrics walks a different path. It systematically spiders through music reviews in various media. The collected recommendations are then presented at […]
The Internet is the perfect tool for procrastination. It is way too easy to get lost in the endless flow of information. Time management becomes a challenge. You can virtually surf the net forever and you will always find some interesting new thing. Abstaining from the net is hard, but many of us already have […]
The Internet opened many new beautiful ways of communication, many of them even in real time. Unfortunately, Internet connections have always had a latency that has been too high to allow musicians to play across the globe. The small delays which appear on every net connection are a massive problem for musical applications. Now, another […]
How Google & Co. rank their search results is generally considered a mystery. For search engines, this is one of their most precious secrets. A whole industry called search engine optimization (SEO) emerged around this secret. SEOs try to look behind the secret and optimize web sites to the factors which they think influence the […]
Music is great. Music is manifold. Everyone has his own taste of music. What is loved by one might be refused by the next. These different preferences make it pretty difficult to find new great music. The spectrum is – fortunately – large, but finding the music that appeals to you personally turns out to […]
Besides all this fancy new technology, you should not forget those primitive methods to find great new music. You can still ask friends for recommendations, listen in your record store to an unknown CD because it has an interesting name or simply looks pretty. The success rates of these “analog” techniques are surprisingly high.
Similar to Last.fm, Pandora is a personalized radio system, but without community features. It does not use a separate player application, but a Flash player on its homepage.