last.fm

And in terms of songs:

Okay, interesting to know. But this is actually not a very convincing argument for last.fm, especially since the charts are only created by counting the played songs, which is completely nonsense for the album chart, because the number of tracks on the album and the length of the tracks are not taken into account. For example, I listened 18 times to a track from Tangerine Dream - Rubycon and also 18 times to a track from Alanis Morissette - Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. Well, Rubycon contains 2 songs with 17 and bit minutes each. SFIJ contains 17 songs with something like 4m:30s each. Hence I actually listened once to the SFIJ and nine times to Rubycon, in terms of time this is reduced to a factor of roughly 5. But yet both albums are ranked the same. Doesn't make too much sense.

But anyhow. One interesting and useful thing about last.fm is the events listing. You can set a location and then you will get a list of all concerts and festivals within a certain radius of that location. And in the brave new world of Web2.0, you of course create the content and can enter events. This is a nice feature to get an idea of what is going on. So by resetting my location from Potsdam to Edinburgh, I did find a concert I am interested in and wouldn't have know about otherwise: Joan Baez. Cool.

And while I was looking around, a couple of other interesting concerts surfaced I otherwise certainly would not have noticed early enough to get tickets, namely Within Temptation, the Lord of the Ring concert and Loreena McKennitt. For the first two I got tickets, but not for Loreena, which is really a pity, as I was looking for tour dates a while ago and could not find any for her. And now it is already sold out. Argh.

Also the events can serve as a backlog of things you've attended, I tried to fill in most of the concerts I have been to so far, not that many anyway. It proved extremely difficult to find the date of my first concert: incidentally Loreena McKennitt. After over an hour of googeling, exaleading and yahooing I finally came across a page listing the dates of the Book of Secrets tour.

And then of course there is the community and social aspect: Based on what you are listening, a neighbour list is generated consisting of people sharing your taste of music. Well, from a technical point of view it would be interesting to know how exactly the algorithms work there, but okay, it somewhat seems to work. But then I really have no clue what I am supposed to do with a neighbour list of 250 people. I am not going systematically through them.

Besides this neighbour list you can also find out, who has been listening to the different artists by clicking on the artist page. And actually by browsing through these lists I did find some interesting things. For some very promising opera influenced gothic rock check out Jessica's project Once There Was (demo mp3s for download)! I actually do plan to order the demo CDs, but this is a different story.

I am still not totally convinced of this whole thing, but it certainly has its nice features. And it seems to be a nice tool to get to know people. And this can't be bad.

Ah, they added a new feature, at least I haven't seen that before, the quilt: