Do you like my la la?

la la just created this cool little flash doo-hicky to let people browse the CDs I have available for trading via this here blog:





Pretty cool!

(In case you missed my earlier post, I'm pretty well hopelessly addicted to la la.)

Operation Depth Charge: Last.fm gets a makeover

The awesome social music networking site Last.fm has gone live with it's updates/upgrades for the summer, and things are looking pretty sexy.

I've been using Last.fm in one guise or another for the last three years. I love having charts and history of my listening habits, since music is one of the true loves of my life (taking a distant second to my incomparable wife of course). Given that the Internet is another of my loves, the chance to combine the two is irresistible – thinking about the number of music CDs and DVDs I've bought from Amazon over the years shows just how irresistible. A site that not only tracks my listening habits and allows me to share them with others, discover new music and fellow music lovers based on my personal tastes, and listen to my music from any internet-enabled computer anywhere? That's pure gold.

For some time now, Last.fm has had a quirky set of apps and plugins to do all this tracking and recommending, and a cool but cluttered interface for the website itself. This latest push, codenamed “Operation Depth Charge”, has made major improvements to the website's usability and given it a much more polished, fun and dare I say Web 2.0 look and feel. The Last.fm player has also gotten a major overhaul, improving it's usability and usefulness pretty dramatically.

Unfortunately the part that kind of got overlooked was the array of plugins and apps that allow you to report your offline mp3 player listening -- all but one of these, YamiPod, have been abandoned in the wake of the new upgrades and are no longer to be officially supported going forward. The jury's still out on whether I'm going to be as happy with that as I have been with the now-unsupported-by-Last.fm iScrobbler plugin, but I imagine I'll get inspired to let you all know when I've formed an opinion...

I love la la

For the past couple of weeks, I've been trying out a new CD service called la la. I'll leave it to them to explain how it all works, but needless to say it's a cool system that makes trading legal CDs easy, cheap, and still manages to give back twenty percent of the revenues to the artists. The more I use it and the more I think about it, I'm certain it's genius.

Imagine Netflix combined with peer to peer networking, except with CDs instead of DVDs or MP3s, and you're getting pretty close. Throw in an interface that's like a Flickr-ized version of Amazon and you're pretty much there.

I've put close to 400 discs on my have list and about 375 on my want list, and have already traded around 40 CDs. Very cool.

Membership is limited currently since they're still in beta, but if you want an invite I'm happy to share one of the few I have left. All I ask in return is that you be generous with your own invites when you get them.