If you’re looking around for a free Internet radio to listen to but haven’t checked out Pandora Radio yet, I highly advise you see for yourself how cool it is. It’s personalized Internet radio meets social networking all in one. You choose as many stations as you want by song title or artist and it taps into the Music Genome Project® and fetches other songs with similar characteristics as those you selected. It’s like one big personalized music search engine.
You can also personalize your selections by rating each song. And like all good Web social networking sites, you can share your station with other Pandora members (registration is free).
As far as using the Music Genome Project, I couldn’t help thinking about how the process of assembling and assigning “genes” to each piece of music is similar to tagging and metadata for search. Whether the approach to your site’s metadata is top-down, folksonomie, or a combination of the two, it’s clearly a key factor for helping site visitors discern the differences between your pages, either from internal or organic search. If the people over at Pandora got lazy about how the gene process, the entire premise of the site would be negated.
Which bring me to my next point: adding metadata to a site’s pages can also seem arduous and can often feel like a waste of time, especially seeing how you can automate the process through content management tools. I don’t like this approach however, since it’s easy to ignore visitor labeling vocabularies. One quick and easy place to verify your labeling vocabulary is with your site’s analytics. I run reports on a quarterly basis on just my site’s internal search terms to look for trends or gaps with current labeling systems.
I also find it helpful to checkout what other terms industry websites are using and to reference online examples of classification schemes and thesauri. These can be especially useful when constructing new site taxonomies.
Whoa! -Internet radio to site taxonomies, how did that happen?
If you have any other creative ways to help construct your website labels are or any cool internet radio sites, please drop me a line.
Good luck,
-L
Nice post. I love pandora in order to discover new music from around the world. But for listening to radios throug the web I use Radiobeta (http://www.radiobeta.com). try it out. No need to register or to download anything. Higly recommended for radio lovers
Keep up the nice post
Good luck
P
Pedro,
Thanks for the link to radiobeta! I’ve been listening to it lately and really like it. It’s got more options than pandora, like news and such which I find helpful.
Thanks again for the link!