#19 Web 2.0 Awards

The awards look interesting, for the exercise I decided to try and look at something we hadn't looked at yet during the course and choose music. So I clicked on the Pandora Internet Radio like, unfortunately when I was connected with the site I was taken to a screen that displayed a letter from the founder stating that due to the licensing constraints they are not allowed to allow access to those outside of the US. Although the company is trying to change this through more licensing agreements. I thought that this was really sad for a tool that is suppose to make the Internet more user friendly to be caught up in politics but I guess they have to follow the rules or else they may collapse and people would loose their jobs and all of the flow on effects. I guess it is far better to try and do things legally than illegally due to the consequences that can occur.

So after this I went and played on Last.fm, I found this site to be interesting as I could listen to some music without joining up. This site in based in London and I found that even once I joined up I could only listen to little bits of music from the musicals section if any at all. I did find John Farnham on the Last.fm. Last.fm is a site that plays music but also has a social side though a social network of listeners. The website also lists similar artists to the one that the user has chosen. I created a profile to see if I could do more as a member than not and it gave me a bit more choice. I had trouble putting a widget on my blog because according to the site I haven't listened to enough music yet and created a play list. I did manage to create a widget by taking the only choice that I could and pasting the html code into the blog where I wanted it on the page layout screen.

As for how useful this tool would be in a library setting would depend on the library in which one worked. I think that in any public library one would have to request earphones be used for courtesy because if every patron was listening to their music at once loudly everyone would have a headache from the clash of sounds. I like some of the features of this website in that it enabled you to see similar artists but I did at times find this a problem. I like listening to musicals over pop music and there wasn't much there in the musical section. I did try the classical section and that fared a bit better. I wasn't sure about the way in which you could select a tag or artist and the only music that played was what the system choose for you. The user didn't get to choose which John Farnham track that was listened to. I wonder if this is part of the listening agreements that exist.

Onto Youtube and #20, nearly, nearly there :)