Last.fm - growing too...

Must be something in the air with Last.fm also being mentioned in the financial press on the same day as Pandora.com. Interesting to note how Pandora.com supposedly makes more money from advertising than selling tracks via affiliates, whereas the FT reports that Last.fm's position is the other way round.

Last.fm, the London-based music Web site, is to increase its efforts to generate advertising revenues from its 26 million users. CBS acquired Last.fm for 280 million dollars a year ago. Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, said: "One of the main reasons Last.fm agreed to be acquired by CBS had everything to do with the fact that we have great relationships with agencies and advertisers." Last.fm currently receives more revenues from selling tracks via affiliates such as Amazon and Apple's iTunes than it does from advertising, so last week it began testing a redesign with 150 percent more advertising inventory.

Quite a few folk have asked if it would be possible to develop an application like PandoraJam but for Last.fm. If anybody has experience using Windows based Last.fm applications, or has features they would want for a souped-up Last.fm experience, post your comments below...

Pandora.com - growing quietly...

If you like Pandora.com and want to know more about its roots, it's worth checking out a MarketWatch article about the start-up. Interesting to note that CEO Tim Westergren identifies Clear Channel Communications as their main competitor, whereas most listeners would have been thinking about the web 2.0 music services such as last.fm and slacker.com.

I tend to agree that Clear Channel are "the owner and operator of many bland, mainstream radio stations" and would also add that regardless of listening tastes, their web-sites are abysmal and Mac / Safari unfriendly, with pop-up windows and plug-ins galore. If you want to time-shift these stations, use iRecordMusic... and of course, if you want a souped-up Pandora.com experience, check out PandoraJam :-)

Radiotastic update: 0.93

A new version of Radiotastic is now available for download. Note that some of the Leopard issues mentioned previously still apply.

Download link:
http://www.bitcartel.com/downloads/radiotastic.wdgt.zip

Summary of changes:

• Fixed an issue where recent Apple updates caused loading of streams to fail.

PandoraJam News : Loss of functionality

UPDATE: 22 May 2008 - Good news... things seem to be working fine for the majority of users, but we will keep on monitoring the situation. Contact support@pandorajam.com if you have any issues.

Dear PandoraJam users,

Recent changes to the Pandora.com web-site (whom as you know are not affiliated or in anyway connected to PandoraJam) are causing problems for PandoraJam. In light of these issues, we felt it best to provide you with an update:

• Airtunes playback is working (AppleTV airtunes support is being looked at),
  
• Recording, Growl, and online status integration (last.fm, twitter, etc) are currently broken. If in your case things are still working, we recommend you do not create any new stations, or login or logout of the Pandora.com service, but otherwise continue to use as normal.

PandoraJam was released last year, and we have had very good compatibility since day one. Many changes to Pandora.com are behind the scenes, unknown to the user, and we have handled those, including the recent switch from MP3 streaming to AAC+ streaming. Unfortunately, recent changes in the first week of May 2008, over at Pandora.com, are making it increasingly hard to maintain full compatibility.

If we are unable to resolve the issues, regarding your purchase, if you purchased on or after March 1st 2008, you may request a refund. Our normal refund policy is 30 days since date of purchase, but we wanted to extend this period given the circumstances. Folks who purchased before this period, we hope you enjoyed using the software (we think at $15 it's been great value and a lot of fun!) and we will be offering you a discount coupon on our other software. Thanks for your understanding.

We will of course try our best to investigate and restore service... we may update and change the way the application works, perhaps with slightly different functionality, as it is not yet currently known whether existing application functionality can be fully restored. Please stay tuned.

If you have any questions, please email support@pandorajam.com. Thank you.

Introducing Comics.ning.com

A site has been setup for ComicBookLover users and other digital comic fans to chat, so please head on over!

[Invite Link]
http://comics.ning.com/?xgi=5b4rhBk

[Site]
http://comics.ning.com

Ning is a service that lets people build social networks, and while I imagine some of you don't want to have to remember yet another username and password combination, there are quite a few comic related networks on Ning, so you can join all of them :)

It's over to y'all now...