Sorry for the title, I just can't resist provoking trolls....

Anyway, I want to tell you all about the coolest thing I've just found called Pandora. (hence the photo of Pandora... etc etc) Pandora is a radio station, err, stations sponsored by the Music Genome Project. It is free with banner ads but you can purchase a version with no ads and it seems relatively inexpensive.

The premise of Pandora is that you create your own station by starting out with one or a few artists. Pandora will play selections by those artists and then play selections by other artists with similarities either to the song or artists that you start out with. The music and computer geeks that run Pandora use a complicated formula of analyzing and listening to all sorts of music to figure out what they're doing and how the songs get to your radio station.

It also allows you to rate songs with thumbs-up and thumbs-down so you can decide whether or not you want to hear this song again, hear more songs like this song, or never hear it again.

You can listen to other people's stations and find quite a plethora of music on there... :D

There are some drawbacks:
1) You can't go back and listen to a song in your playlist again unless you go to your profile and bookmark the song.
2) You can't skip more than 5 songs in any playlist during a listening session.
3) The Flash isn't perfect - I've had it freeze on me a couple of times now. I'm upgrading to the latest version of Flash so I'll let you know if that solves the problem.
4) They're a little short on local music, however, when you submit an artist's name that they DON'T have in their database, they do actually go out and try to find that artist, listen to them and add them into the database.

Jimmy Johnson, this is right up your freakin' alley!

Anyway, here's my profile and my radio station.

On a sad side note: Iwao Takamoto, the creator of Scooby Doo, passed away on Tuesday, a mere three weeks after the death of Hanna-Barbera co-founder, Joseph Barbera. Velma, I always loved you. And now it's too late.... *sigh*