I have heard about Musicmesh before but did not find the time to take a closer look at their service until now. The website is one of those web 2.0 sites who all look and feel the same. Musicmesh offers a related music search engine which connects music albums that are somehow related. One album is always centered and other music albums that float around it. If you move the mouse above one of them you can read the title and artist. A click centers this album and displays new related albums. This means that you can explore new albums by simply clicking on them to find more albums that you might like.

It would not make much sense if you would not be able to listen to those songs, would not it ? Musicmesh integrates services from other websites , namely Youtube, Wikipedia and Amazon, into their site. Next to that is a review pane which offers reviews of the particular album or band. The best thing so far is that if you select a album you will see the tracklist of that album in the right pane.

continue reading "Find and Listen to new Music with Musicmesh"

You surely now what has happened during the last week. The AACS send some cease and desist letters to bloggers and website owners requesting the takedown of the so called HD-DVD processing key. The story more or less exploded on the web. The main reason for this was probably the way the admins of digg.com handled the affair. Their first decided to pull all articles posted to digg containing the key which lead to a furious reaction of the digg community who submitted so many articles about the key to digg that the founder of digg decided to follow the lead of his community and let it happen.

In the meanwhile many news sites, radio stations and even tv networks published stories about what was happening on the Internet distributing the key exponentially on the Internet. If you search for the code today you find that more than 1.3 million websites reference it. The AACS nevertheless decided to take on the fight which leads to question that I would like to ask “Have not they learned a thing from last weeks events ?”

continue reading "AACS’s response to the publicity that they generated"

Internet users from outside the United States are officially excluded from using Pandora to create their own radio stations with songs similar to the ones they have entered at the creation of the music station. Aggrega will surely profit from Pandora’s move although it does not offer the same service. By signing up with Aggrega you can create so called custom channels which are created automatically after assigning a name and a group, artist or genre to them. All videos seem to be taken from Youtube as of now which should not be a problem because I think they are added manually to the database.

I would not be able to explain otherwise why some bands are not found although their music videos are available at Youtube. After creating a channel you have the option to create another one or view the already created channels. If you choose the second option you see your channels on the left side and videos that have been found at Youtube on the right one.

continue reading "Aggrega is a Pandora Clone for Music Videos"

If you like to think about the unexplainable, the mysterious, the paranormal you are one of the users who might find Disclose.tv very interesting. Like Mulder and Scully from X-Files you can delve into this site and take a look at the videos that they offer. On the technical site Disclose.tv is a pretty good Youtube clone serving only their niche. The site does offer videos and pictures as well as a forum and other ways to communicate with the community. The biggest video category so far is the Aliens & Ufology category with 234 videos followed by Paranormal with 80 videos and Spirituality with 31.

Quality counts on sites like Disclose.tv which explains the low amount of videos that are available at the moment. Another reason is of course that the site is relatively new but seems to draw some attention to its service at the moment. You can watch all videos on Disclose.tv without registering to the site and videos can be embedded as well into other websites. Some videos on the website are quite fascinating, not saying that they show true events but it makes you wonder if this could be real or not.

continue reading "Disclose.tv X-Files sharing community"

Pandora stopped their Music Genome Project from streaming to clients that would access the Pandora website from outside the United States yesterday. They are now checking the IP of every visitor and depending on his location he is either presented with the normal Pandora website or a letter which explains the situation that he is not allowed to use Pandora due to licensing difficulties. Internet Radio should be accessible from anywhere, just like normal radio that does not know boundaries as well.

Before I explain how to listen to Pandora from outside the United States I would like to ask a question: “I did use Pandora to find new music and I actually did buy some of the music that I found. Since I’m not allowed to use Pandora anymore I won’t find new music this way which means I won’t eventually buy new music. Do you think that this is a clever strategy ?” I have no usage stats for Pandora but would be excited to know the ratio of US to International users of the service.

continue reading "Access Pandora from outside the USA"