Two anecdotes

Two relatively trivial events stick in my mind this morning, probably as some form of relief from yesterdays post.

Firstly I use Pandora when I can’t decide what music to play or when I am looking for something new. It’s a great service and in it’s simplest form you give it the name of an artist you like listening to and it makes a play list of similar music that you approve or disapprove and the software learns from that. That in itself is cool and I heartily recommend that you try it out.

So the other day I keyed in Deva Premal, a wonderfully inspiring, soothing and relaxing artist and Pandora did it’s magic. I discovered two artists that I had never heard, Moya (Maire) Brennan and Laura Powers. Between my eMusic (non DRM) and iTunes (definately DRM) accounts I was able to purchase a few CDs worth of music and added them to my iPod.

Stick with me here as I’m almost finished and it gets even more interesting.

I am also a member of Last.fm which acquired scrobbler some time back. Whenever I play music on my PC my account on Last.fm is updated in real time and this gives an idea of what artists and songs I am listening to with some really cool statistics. Basically anybody can see what I am listening to.

A few days ago I got an email from Laura Powers thanking me for listening to her music, she had noticed from aggregation of listeners to her music that I was listening, hence the email. Now I am sometimes thankfully a little naive so this might well have been an automated response of some kind but it was, all the same, a nicer than usual email.

The other event was an email I got through YouTube yesterday. I put up a videoclip I had edited of a visit to my hometown 15 odd years ago and a guy wrote to me to compliment me on the video but also to ask me when it was shot as he found one of the children accidentally filmed in the video looked a lot like him and he lived in the neighbourhood around that time. I paraphrase his own word here “scary”. Scary indeed. Talk about global village!