PJ Brunet

CBS's Last.fm Offers Full-Track Streaming 3X Free

The "music-discovery" "random order" you speak of is not that random because you can get into a very specific tag like "idm" or you can specify a specific (smilar-to) artist like "ulrich schnauss".

On top of that, the whole point of last.fm is it's learning what you like and dislike because you're interacting with the service pushing the "ban song" and "love song" (etc.) buttons. So yes, while it may seem random it's not really that random, there's an algorithm behind it. While I discover music through the site, obviously, that's not why I use the similar-to and tag modes. What I get, even when I'm not paying the small monthly charge to rotate my "loved" tracks, is personalized because I put a lot of work into banning songs and "loving" songs. So it's a bit nicer than surfing from DJ to DJ at Shoutcast.com for example. But now I'm wondering how they will apply the 3x rule, will it only apply to the artist pages?

CBS' Last.fm Jumps On The On-Demand Streaming Bandwagon

I heard this news yesterday and I'm still confused about it. I've been a last.fm user for a long time and all the songs are full-length (at least the 15,000+ tracks I've listened to) and there's never been a limit to how many times you can listen, in fact they chart out for each user your favorite tracks by the # of plays.

See for yourself, third chart at the bottom:
www.last.fm/user/pjbru...

I hope this announcement doesn't signal change to the service, pushing away the existing support that got them this far. They can advertise last.fm all they want on TV now but I'm sure they know guys like me have more influence here than all their burned out TV shows combined.

Google Introduces Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up; The Threat To Other Ad and Affilate Networks Grows (GOOG, VCLK)

One major implication here is this--an advertiser bids for space on my page, now my authority rank, naturally, goes sky high leaving the scraper sites in the dust, where they belong.

Google should win big here because it will have this new army of internet threshers... I'd think with enough click data you could begin to automate this threshing process, or at least make more broad, sweeping decisions as far as per-site ad distribution.