Aweditorium- Aural Happiness

Aweditorium is music discovery at its very best. Serendipity meets music, meets the iPad.

While its mostly a universe of Indie music, it's a broad enough experience for surprise and delightful discoveries no matter what your musical tastes.

http://www.aweditorium.com/

Bluetooth Audio comes of Age

Being an early adopter most often means being disappointed. You dive in and purchase the latest and greatest gadget and the user experience is often just not great. On this occasion I am glad to announce that I am in love with Jawbones, Jambox Bluetooth speaker. It does exactly what it says on the box with some surprising extras. It will stream music from your phone of choice, you can use it for conference calls and you can update the software as Jawbone releases software upgrades. This is a buy with no regrets.

Flicktion

Flicktion is a new form of creative writing involving taking an online image from Flickr, and writing a fictional story about that image.

While Flicktion will most likely be used as a creative writing educational exercise, its another great example of whole new genres being created in the online world.

With 740,880,729 pictures on Flickr, that is a lot of pictures waiting for a new and fictional story. Have fun.

Example of Flicktion can be found here

Prevention of a Nuisance

Cell Phone Numbers Go Public this month. All cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls..... YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222.

This is 100% legitimate. I have called and registered my own cell number. Of course you can still call me at any time. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It takes less than 15 seconds. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON. Of course you can still call me at any time.

What does the internet think?

Reviews, rants and raves, the Internet is crammed full with opinions on every topic a mind could ever think of. In 2007 I blogged on the value and power of peer reviews, and how studying peer product reviews can help you make smarter purchasing decisions. However, beyond smarter purchasing, how else might a trillion reviews and comments be of interest.? Well I am glad you asked. I have been having some fun with a new website that allows me to aggregate the total universe of global opinions on a given topic and see if there negative, positive or simply indifferent.

what does the internet think.net describes itself as a global enquiry tool that searches the Internet for the global opinion

on your search term. So I picked some topics and started to check global opinion. I started with President Obama and

felt the results seemed believable. 51.5% positive, 47.7% negative and 0.8% who don't care.

So what about Michael Jackson:

I am going to presume that the 90.7% positive is inflated due to the worlds recent loss, I am sure before his death the

negative number may have been higher. I did a lot of searches especially with company names. No surprises that

Apple Computers get 92.3% positive and General Motors is getting 81.5% negative. I work for NECN (New England Cable News),

the largest regional news network in America, and I was delighted to see that the global opinion was 100% positive compared to

CNN at 45% positive and Fox news at only 6.8% positive. So have fun seeing how the company you work for is doing among global opinions.

Fake it, until you make it!

For a generation of guitar and drum players, watching kids and young adults bouncing around with plastic guitars with big colored buttons should be depressing. The future of instrument playing is ruined, right? Well, it turns out that game play actually generates interest in the 'real thing.'

Research from one of Britain's largest music charities, Youth Music, has shown that up to ‘2.5 million children have picked up real guitars and drums after playing music-themed video games like guitar hero.’

The report conducted by Youth Music found that of the 12 million young people aged from 3 to 18, more than half played music games. A fifth of those gamers said that they now played an instrument after catching the musical bug from the games. So it appears that many of us start out faking it and then decide that we should have a go at the real thing.

So what might be the lesson here, when education is mixed with entertainment everyone wins. Capture my imagination and you capture me.

(Source: timesonline.co.uk)

Tweeting, broadcasting your inner voice

Reading tweets can be a little addictive. I am following 1,871 people on Twitter, the majority of whom I have really no idea who they are. I am surprised on a daily basis by the type of thoughts people freely tweet. While I imagine most tweeters use a 'thought filter,' out of the large group I am following there is a crowd who broadcast their inner voice obviously without any 'thought filter.'

At the outset I imagined Twitter as a great new communication service for friends to quickly communicate with each other, no longer any need to log into an email account and compose. Having been on twitter for some months, I am realizing that it seems to be much more of platform for people to express themselves freely. As ideas and thoughts float across people minds, their inner voice now has its own radio station. I am hoping that the same inner voice that manifested a thought might also ask you ' are you sure you want to broadcast this particular thought to the world, we might want to keep this one to ourselves.'