There isn’t an easier way to get into customized, streaming radio than to fire up Pandora. You literally only have to type in the name of a song or band, and it’s off and running. You tell it what you like and don’t, and it gets better at playing stuff more like what you like.

Their FAQ does a nice job of getting most users started, but here’s what I’ve been able to figure out by using it a lot:

• You can create lots of stations, and you should. I’m into a ton of different genres, pretty much by mood, and so I have a few stations with my favorite two or three bands in that genre. This will help you discover more bands like those bands, and you can expand each station that way.
• A couple of my more genre-hopping favorite artists (Ween, Pixies, etc.) have really bad stations to start with. From what I can tell, it’s dividing the whole Ween songbook up, and finding similar songs to each, and playing those. The Pixies station pretty much plays a lot of acoustic-guitar-driven early-90s sounding crap, with some very weird oddball choices thrown in. I’ve had much better luck adding my three or four favorite songs for each artist, and then encouraging Pandora when it starts down the right path.
• The other thing the algorithm can’t figure out: attitude. Finding a hundred songs like “The Statue Got Me High” is fairly easy (punchy guitars, electric rock instrumentation, go). There’s no computer algorithm for “literary” or “clever”, so the closest you might get is Blind Melon. I try not to confuse it by getting too pushy with the button: if it’s way off, you’re probably better off tuning the original tracks or artists, not telling it “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this”. (It does have plenty of late-90s Default / Fuel / Nickelback in store for you, no matter what, so feel free to “no no no” that.)
• The first few stations I created were truly attempts at capturing every existing interest, passion or investment I’d ever made into music. There is, however, no reason you couldn’t start a station for a band you were only interested in finding out more about. I own no Pretenders, but there’s no receipt check at Pandora, so I said they were one of my favorite artists, and the station it put together is pretty nice.
• Don’t be afraid of the “why did you play this?” button: it explains a lot about the brilliant (and idiotic) algorithm behind everything.
• Oh, and rename all your stations. There’s nothing worse than setting up a station for Beloved Artist, having it called Beloved Artist Radio, and being reminded constantly that they are playing music you do not love as much as you love Beloved Artist.

Dear me…

I am Barrister Mike Haward, a solicitor at
law,personal attorney to Mr.O.G.Nordquist, a national
Of your country and a contractor with Togo Regional
Water Scheme in Lome Togo. Here in after shall be
referred to as my client.

I’d been wondering about dear uncle O.G., but I didn’t think I’d be hearing from his barrister.

On the 22nd of June 2003, my client,his wife and their
only daughter were involved in a car accident along
Nouvissi express Road. All occupants of the vehicle
unfortunately lost there lives. Since then I have made
several enquiries to your embassy here to locate any
of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved
unsuccessful.

As I imagined, the unimaginable has happened.  And I find out right before Thanksgiving!  I’ll have to inform J.E., R.K., F.A., and little C.E.

After these several unsuccessful attempts,I decided to
track his last name over the Internet, to locate any
member of his family hence I contacted you.I have
contacted you to assist in repartrating the fund
valued at US$7.5 million left behind by my client
before it gets confisicated or declared unserviceable
by the bank where this huge amount were deposited.

Now if I had the money to send to Barrister Mike Haward, you know I would, because $7.5 million is a lot of money, and if you can’t trust a barrister in Togo on the internet, who can you trust?  Alas, we’ve got no money to pay the processing fees, so that $7.5 million will just be sitting there until he finds another Nordquist on the internet…

I had an email this morning that said that Flock was ready.  Actually, it said that Flock wasn’t ready, but I could go ahead and try the new browser anyway. 

Flock’s been popping to the top of del.icio.us lately, and they don’t even have their product ready yet.  To top it off, every world-busting idea they have would be pretty easy to implement with Firefox and extensions.  Imagine my surprise when the download ended up being a skinned, customized version of Firefox.  Oh well.

Here’s what to love about it:

• Bookmarks don’t exist: it’s just built on your del.icio.us account.  You bookmark something, it goes to del.icio.us.  You store something in del.icio.us, it shows up on all of your Flocked browsers.
• Therefore, the browser-to-del.icio.us interface is awesome.  The del.icio.us-to-browser interface is awesome.  It’s just one integrated thing, and that’s fabulous.
• The other feature is integration with a couple of popular blogging packages: you select some text, you hit the button, it posts for you with no password, no fussing, no nothing.  Very slick.

Here’s what I didn’t like about it:

• Holy quiet integration.  I bookmarked some stuff not realizing that I was posting it to del.icio.us.  (I thought the star was for posting to del.icio.us, but no, you’re saving your email, bank, "personal" sites, etc. with del.icio.us for all to see.)
• Blog integration isn’t very well explained, and… I don’t know.  I care about what gets posted here.
• Existing Firefox extensions only work if you hack them individually.  Do they really think that extension developers will publish a Flock version and a Firefox version?  I might be able to live with it, once I figure out what it does, but I need AdBlock.  This is not negotiable.

In short, this beta software is acting quite a bit like beta software.  It’s a promising concept, again, so once we all figure out what in the world the RSS aggregator is, and how it handles the whole social-whatever-thing it’s trying to be, but for now, I’m too married to Firefox.

Jakob Nielsen (who is more opinionated than is completely necessary, but still more clued-in than any developer at my office) has a great article up about forms, and why your website is probably overdoing it (and testing your users’ patience). 

I don’t have much to add to that, except to complain about the State dropdown.  Why do I need to pick my state from a dropdown list?  I can type "MN" about 800 times faster than I can find it in a list of 50.  Sometimes typing "MN" when the dropdown is enough to bring up "MN", but it might miss "Minnesota" or "Minnesota - MN" or lots of other super-helpful "enhancements" you do-nothing webdesigners have come up with.

It’s not like you can’t validate the state in a two-long text field, or even that having the crazy 50-long dropdown prevents misuse.  I once sold a DVD to somebody who used AR as their state, even though they wanted me to ship to Afghanistan.  Figure that one out.

Google’s been busy, busy, busy this week.  The most significant release was Google Talk, which is a pretty ho-hum chat client.  I haven’t used it’s Skype-like features, but I do appreciate the fact that multiple machines can be logged into the same Google Talk account, and that new messages are delivered to all logged in clients.  That’s an important feature to anyone who uses more than one machine (and there are a lot of us).

Second on the list of importance, I think, is the fact that you can now invite yourself to Gmail.  They’ll send an authorization code to any cell phone.  So the beta is pretty much over.

I ignored the new Google Desktop, just because I couldn’t really remember anything that I really liked about the first version.  Yeah, it searches your files, but I’ve got AppRocket for that, and I love it.  I didn’t really want my personal results comingled with my Google results, anyway: I wasn’t sure what to expect when I clicked, and I don’t like that.

But I saw that they’d added Outlook search, which is exactly what I’ve been loving about Gmail and angry about in my current office Outlook situation.  (In brief: I saw an email in the past few days about the office fridge being cleaned out, and then a bunch of stuff from the fridge appeared in my mini-fridge, and I wanted to check that fridge-cleaning mail, but I couldn’t remember who sent it or what the subject line was.) 

But the sidebar is the easiest win for this new version.  Let’s just go through what I like about it.

1. Internet-savvy panels include displaying photos from RSS feeds (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny weather (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny stocks (it’s okay, Konfabulator), and a tiny mail reader (that integrates Outlook and Gmail… if you’re into that).
2. A modified RSS reader automatically rips RSS feeds from the pages you visit, and puts together a "best of" based on what you visit most often.  This could be nothing short of the missing link in RSS feeds.  Everyone could use RSS, but few are ever going to go through the trouble of learning which sites have it, which don’t, and subscribing to the feeds that would minimize their information overload.  This app does it for you… automatically… correctly.  It’s smart.  It’s almost creepy, but it’s really okay once you get used to it.
3. An internet best-of panel, which just ranks the pages you visit most often.  Again, something that’s just cruising in the background, ready to help… I like it.

This may not topple the intercontinental communications infrastructure as we know it (like Google Talk might, if they can work those deals with VoIP providers and get real phone numbers hooked in, like Skype), but putting more information at my fingertips (and getting me to uninstall half of my Konfabulator widgets) is notable, too. 

I’m totally excited for Yourself!Fitness to come.  It’s supposed to be an awesome personal trainer disguised as a $30 PS2 game.  But I don’t judge.

Anyway, in my excitement, I’ve been visiting the Yourself!Fitness forum that the game’s publishers host, and there are many many people with identical weight-loss or weeks-I’ve been training tickers as part of their sigs.  I did a quick search for "make your own ticker" and found the thing they’re all using.

And I made one.

I am seriously thinking about adding this to my sig at work.  It would be sublimely annoying, and so wrong of me.

I am not exactly sure why this shirt appeals to me so much: the sixties-Americana-marketing tone of the anthropomorphic gyros cone, the absurdity of the remark, or the fact that it’s just so rude… people who aren’t college students probably get killed wearing it. (The shirt says “this Original GYROS Sandwich / is smarter than our president!”)

Judge for yourself, I guess. I find it hilarious.

Link: ShirtsSoGood.com | CafePress” href=”http://www.cafepress.com/shop/food/browse/store/ShirtsSoGood.20232998″>Gyros Ringer T > ShirtsSoGood.com | CafePress

I dumped Google Web Accelerator the other day.  Its proxying was proving to be a distraction in my day-to-day life. 

Don’t get me wrong: browsing with GWA on is insanely fast.  I noticed the jump right away when I installed it, and I started seeing images get all pokey again once I uninstalled.  But if I’m testing my internet connection, and it gets me a copy of a page I loaded five minutes ago, it’s lying to me, isn’t it?  For the regular web, that’s fine, but my own pages and my own changes should get special treatment, and it’s tough to remember to whitelist (blacklist?) everything that I don’t want acceleration on. 

The worst was when I was configuring my router.  The local cache was serving up old copies of 192.168.1.1, when 192.168.1.1 was actually unreachable.  That’s no good. 

I’ll leave aside the debate about whether or not GWA will actually go out to other people’s caches and deliver pages that weren’t meant for you.  There were definitely some strange results arising from the use of this system (leading one site I visited last week to block GWA users completely, saying that you should uninstall the software and come back), but I think Google wasn’t bending the rules so much as shattering expectations.  It’s a cool idea, it really works, and I hope they iron the wrinkles out.

Accusing Google of snatching passwords, reading emails, assembling dossiers, and watching you sleep are all monster-under-the-bed thinking.  I won’t even address that here.

If you like the internet, and you like Cockeyed.com, you’ve been waiting for the first prank that includes the Cockeyed baby.  Behold: Ant Caution Sign.

Oh wow… nerd fury about PayPal and eBay.  Many valid criticisms, including

• you never know what PayPal’s going to do with your money, do you?
• in many cases, PayPal just moves money when shady people complain, and there’s not much you can do about it, is there?
• eBay’s kind of flooded with "get an XBox FREE!" listings, isn’t it?
• you don’t find many things for less than retail on there, (or, if you do, the shipping is astronomical…) do you?

Plus, useful information like

• Yahoo auctions are now ad-supported, and free
• Amazon’s got a pretty easy way to sell stuff online, easier for sellers and buyers in a lot of cases

Link: Slashdot | How Amazon and Google are taking eBay’s Business