Pandora: Love this application. You put in artist that you like and it creates a radio station that plays music similar to what you choose. There is some complex algorithms involved to determine what songs sound similar to what you like. Once it makes a choice you can mark whether or not you like the new song. Pandora remembers those choices and helps refine the station to your taste. I have found a lot of interesting new artist this way. They also have a wonderful app for the iPhone that makes it easy to carry around. I used to use Pandora most of the time, but since I am outside the US I am not able to use their service.

last.fm: This is similar to Pandora but with a different flair. Instead of analyzing the musical qualities of the songs like Pandora, last.fm makes choices based on what similar users to you like. This gives you a lot of variation, but with a good chance that you will like all that you hear. Some argue that you might get stuck in the same rut of popularity based choices. I still find enough new music that it isn’t really a problem for me. Both have their pluses so why not try both. Only question that remains is what is traditional radio going to do?

Live365: One thing traditional radio is doing is getting online. Live365 allows not just radio stations, but anyone to put together a radio station of your own. You can either run it live off of your computer, or set up playlist of songs that are stored on their server. I am working on setting one of these up myself. I have always wanted my own station and Live365 allows me to do just that. There is a fee involved. Not much if you just want a small stream (with their ads), but it gets rather expensive when if you want to set up your own for profit station. Good thing about using their service is that they take care of paying all of the licensing fees for playing the music. That saves a lot of hassle for the individual DJ who just wants his music heard. The DJs are what make this such a great resource. They are usually just everyday people who are just really into their music. You get away from the Top 40 stuff that you hear over the airwaves and get into some unique areas. There are genres for every interest and stations that fill every niche that you can think of. They have a pretty good rating system so that you can easily sort out the best of the bunch. Or just listen to something new.

Pitchfork: This website reviews records. Lots and lots of records. It is a good place to catch up on what is going on in the indie music industry. I don’t necessarily agree with what I read, but it at least gives me some idea of what the kids are talking about these days.

There are also the traditional magazines that have online versions: Rolling Stone, Blender, Filter, and others. All give you a good place to find something new.

Or you could just check out what your friends are listening to. Most will probably have a MySpace of Facebook account that will list what they like. Maybe you could even get offline and head over to their place and have a listening party.

Even with all of these online resources, there probably isn’t any better way to find new music than to go out an see it live. So, go out and see a show. Get there early to see the opening bands, and you might just find a new favorite.

First, let’s talk about wordpress itself.  WordPress.org is an open source blogging platform that is used by many individuals as well as organizations.  Here are some notable users. It is also the software that I use to power this website, and my personal blog. You can download the software for free and use it on your own servers (or rented space with a hosting company), or you can go to wordpress.com and they will host your blog for free. I prefer the flexibility that I get by hosting my own blogs, but some prefer the ease of use (and cost) of the pre-hosted version.

Once you have wordpress set up, you will want to look for a good theme. Themes are web templates that provide the design of your site. There are thousands of pre-made themes that can be downloaded for free on the wordpress site. I have used many themes for different sites, and usually find something close to what I like. I can then tweak it to get it perfect. All of the software released for wordpress comes under a license that allows you to modify any of the code. This makes it fun if you like getting into the design code. If you just want something simple, you can usually find a pre-made theme that you will make you happy.

After you have the theme picked out, you can then add plugins. There are plugins for almost anything. Some effect the whole blog, some just do stuff beneath the surface, and some just add useful widget to the sidebars of the site. Here is a list of some of the plugins that I am using.

Askimet is the anti-spam plugin that comes with wordpress. I strongly suggest that you activate this as soon as you can. If your blog gets any popularity you will get a ton of spam comments. The next utility plugin that I use is All in One SEO Pack. This plugin get rid of all the redundancy that search engines see in your site, and also lets you easily add keywords to let the search engines know what you are blogging about. Some people try to game the system to get their pages ranked higher in profitable categories. I try to make my keywords descriptive of what I do and hopefully by writing good content people will start using the information.

Next plugin that I use is cforms. If you click on my contact page up above you will see what you can do with this contact form plugin. For a long time I used Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP (also called gbcf) for contacts (for those of you familiar with my unregimented blog you will notice that the plugin programmer also designed the theme that I use). So even though I was more familiar with the other contact form, I thought that I would try the cforms plugin this time. Cforms is more complex, so I wouldn’t recommend it to some one new to setting up a wordpress blog. If you need the more advanced features maybe you can find a friend to set it up for you. Once it is set up you won’t have to mess with it. People will then be able to contact you directly from your site. If you want to contact me, feel free to give it a try and say, “Hi.”

Over on the side of my blog you can see the result of some of my other plugins. One is the wp-postviews plugin. (Well actually it is a couple of plugin; one for set up and one for posting as a widget). This allows you to see what post are getting the most views. I am getting away from posting in categories. Sometimes it is difficult to get a post to fit into a simple category, and just trying to think of all the possible future categories just gives me headaches. So, instead I am focusing on tags. The tag cloud is a widget that comes in the base package of wordpress. With the Search Box, Tag Cloud, and the Most Viewed sections, hopefully you can find anything on the site.

The last plugin is just a fun one. I use Last.fm RPS to list the last ten songs that I have listened to on last.fm. There are a ton of last.fm plugins, but this one seemed pretty simple to use and had good results. I am also thinking about adding a twitter widget, but I am not sure that I want to get hooked on twittering. The whole concept of micro-blogging seems like a lot of work.

One plugin that I am not currently using, but I have used in the past is Podpress. This plugin allows easy integration with podcast (and video podcast). I would recommend it to any one wanting to set up a podcast.