Streaming Music

I've been looking forward to this section for a long time. My dad and sister have been using Pandora for quite a while, but I haven't played with it very much before today. I think this is a fantastic site and a great way to be introduced to music you may not hear on the mainstream radio stations. Not to mention, a chance to hear stuff that isn't the same thing I have on my ipod over and over again. Now if there was a way I could get this to play in my car on long trips, it would be just about perfect!

I'm excited to play around with Finetune as well and get some playlists I can use on my blog or maybe the library MySpace page.

I've been using streaming music from radio stations for a long time. When I was teaching in Austria my friends and I would sometimes stream music from our local stations back in the states and then, ironically, when I got back to the US, I started streaming music from the Austrian radio station Oe3 to keep up with my German and the European Charts. (I just checked on Pandora and it didn't recognize any of the German artists I enjoy listening too.)

As a music major, I'm really excited about the music streaming options that Sno-Isle has. I wish there had been a way while I was in college to create my own play list of the hundreds of songs I had to know for music history exams and play them back randomly. These are such fantastic resources for any music student.

Now that I've played around with more of these sites, I may need to keep a pair of headphones at my desk so I can stream music while doing desk work! :-)

RSS & Feed Readers

I'm really glad I took the time to get my bloglines account set up this week. I added several sites I like to read and think it will help save time to have them all in one place. I've played around with Pageflakes in the past. Mainly I used it to keep track of a few author blogs. Because they were all in one place, I read them a lot more often and was able to stay up to date very easily. I'm hoping that by adding more feeds to bloglines, I will have the same experience. Now I have everything in one place in a format I find very useful.

There are several ways libraries could use RSS feed technology. What if patrons could be notified about the new titles we've purchased, or find out about program information through RSS feeds? RSS feeds could allow us to send information to our website directly to our patrons. What a great way to keep them coming back and exploring what we have to offer.

That's all for now--my bloglines account is full of new blogs to read!