always listening in

Radio One has just launched Musicubes.

The block on the left there (my musicube) is made up of my prefered music genres. Hover your mouse over each coloured block to preview.

It seems to be a pointless but pretty widget and a nice way of driving more people to the Radio One site.

There seem to be a lot of online radio stations out there as well as music recommendation sites (Last.fm, MusicStrands, etc) but until now nothing that combines the two.

Pandora is a personalised radio service that takes an artist or song you like and it generates a station of music that is related and supposedly similar. The songs it suggests can be rated – if they don’t match your selection it stop relating it to your original choice – which in theory means that the more people using it the better it’ll get.

It’s heavily American focused meaning there’s far too much crappy soft rock but the more you persevere with it the more it learns what you like. Typing the Artic Monkeys the first thing suggested was the LA Guns (a awful 80s soft rock outfit) but later on I got some good Henry Rollins and Screaming Trees.

There’s no advertising at the moment but no doubt they’ll be some very soon – let’s hope it’s text ads on the screen and not audio ads as part of the stream, one of things that puts me off other streamed suggestion music players.

• Pandora

Came across this show on Del.ic.ious:

This week on The Infinite Mind, host Dr. Peter Kramer explores the psychology and history of names, and how they shape our identity. We take a closer look at the curious coincidence of people whose names match their profession, and we speak with film makers Alan Berliner and Grace Lee, who both made documentaries charting their quest for the people who share their name.

We analyze how products like IPod and Viagra were named with Steve Manning, managing director of Igor, a “naming company.” William Bright, a linguist and anthropologist specializing in place names, tells us how places like Boring, Oregon and Intercourse, Pennsylvania got their names. And commentator John Hockenberry explains why names will never hurt him.

• The Infinite Mind

Great stuff:

• Julian Cope session on BBC 6 Music