Entries Tagged 'Reviews' ↓

Want to know how to become an SEO Ninja? Want to know how to do that without searching and reading for two months or buying a book that requires you to buy four other books to understand the first one?

Look no further: Naomi from Ittybiz has written the ebook you’re looking for. It’s fifty pages of no bull-shit content that will get you from not knowing what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to being able to put content up on your blog or website without shooting yourself in the foot in the search engines.

I was originally going to give a cursory review, reading through for useful snippets and such. What actually happened is that I couldn’t stop reading once I started. And I had a good productivity brainstorm going, too…

For those of you who don’t know about Naomi or Ittybiz, I’ll give you the 30 second primer. She’s a marketing coach for businesses with less the five employees. She’s funny. She’s potty-mouthed. She knows her stuff and has a rockin’ blog where she entertains and teaches at the same time.

All of that is evident in the book. It’s entertaining. It’s funny. But it gets you from zero to 60 in SEO.

It’s at this point that I must give a disclaimer. I’ve been heckling harassing helping Naomi with getting this ebook completed. I had nothing to do with the content and likely would have made it worse had I done so. I’m proud to have been a part of the process of getting such a great product to the floor, and man, have I wanted to tell you guys about it.

To tell the truth, I was surprised at how much I learned from the book. Not because I doubted Naomi’s ability, but because I’ve done a lot of research on SEO stuff before and I thought I knew enough to get along pretty well. Turns out I didn’t know as much as I thought.

Here’s what I learned from SEO School:

• I understood what “long tail” keywords were. I didn’t quite understand how to use that information. SEO School showed me how to do it.
• Even when you offer free content, you still have “competitor” sites that are offering their information for free. SEO School gave me a few easy tools and ideas on how to analyze my “competition” so that I can rank better.
• Naomi made it clear to me just how bad I am at writing good text for links. I’ve been working on it, but man, I have a long way to go.
• I’m horrible at picture tags, as well. She gave some really helpful tips on that one, too.

Keep in mind that I’ve done a lot research into SEO, so there’ll be a lot more there for people who haven’t.

Summary: SEO School is a one-stop shop for people who want to learn SEO without picking up an associates’ in Computer Science. The ebook is accessible but doesn’t make you feel stupid, informative but not boring, and funny but not slapstick. Purchasing the ebook will be the best $39 you can spend on improving your knowledge of SEO and your ability to create online content that ranks well in the search engines.

SPECIAL DEAL: Purchase the ebook before July 1st and save $9! Type “MovingDay” to claim your discount when you order SEO School. Click here to find out more about SEO School. Get it now while it’s cheap!

If you don’t like the book, Naomi will refund the entire cost of your purchase, no questions asked. You have nothing to lose, but a whole lot to gain.

The short answer: For most users, Backpack is worth the time and money.

Backpack is an online service offered by 37Signals

that makes organizing your information incredibly easy. Backpack lets you make pages which can contain any combination of notes, to-dos, images, files, etc. You can keep these pages to yourself or share them with colleagues, co-workers, friends, or family.

I first used Backpack last year and, to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. 37Signals acquired Backpack and made a lot of positive changes since then and I decided to give it a try again. I’m glad I did.

I’m done with DotMac….what now?

One of the reasons that I decided to pick Backpack up again is because I decided to stop paying the Annual Apple Tax for its DotMac services. A review of DotMac is it’s own blog post series - and since I don’t want to reenter counseling sessions for broken promises - I’ll let it wait until then. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting enough juice for all the squeezin’ I was doing with the service.

But I was getting some functionality. What I lost when I stopped my DotMac service was the online storage for reference files and a shareable calender. I didn’t use the rest of the service, so not having some of the other features didn’t bother me.

Let me briefly touch on the online storage piece. As some of you know, I’m an officer in the Army National Guard. The Department of Defense has some fairly strict security processes in place such that you can’t plug in personal computers into their network. So, even though I kept all of my files on my personal computer, I would constantly have to shuffle them back and forth between the government issued computers and my laptop. That got annoying.

I used my online storage as a good way to still have access to those files without having to transfer from computer to computer. Furthermore, I never was in the position such that, if I forgot my laptop, I didn’t have those files.

(Note that I could have gotten around this with a mobile harddrive. I never got around to buying one because I didn’t need one as long as I had one of my online services, and they proved more functional for me.)

I would also occasionally be somewhere where I needed access to my files for the teaching and research that I do at the University. With DotMac, I had everything synced in my iDisk, so I was never without a file that I needed. I could have just gotten some online storage through another service like Mozy, but I wanted a more integrated solution.

Enter Backpack for all my file and calendar sharing needs…

Calendar sharing is also a huge feature for me. I’m horrible at telling Angela what I’m doing, even though I often put it in a calendar. My old DotMac service automatically updated her computer when I made changes - so when I no longer had that feature, there was considerable tension as my shifting schedule changed and I didn’t tell her. Having your spouse cook a meal because it’s her turn only to tell her way too late that you’re going to stay late for work causes considerable frustration.

Backpack stepped in quite nicely there, as well. Now when I update my Backpack calendar, she gets an RSS notification that I’ve done so.

But I gained more than those two features. I also really started using the Reminder feature in Backpack, as well. I schedule reminders for important things to remember, and I can set it so that it reminds both of us or one of us. For instance, she had surgery last Thursday, and the doctor informed her that was not to take anti-inflammatory meds for one week prior to her surgery. Rather than try to remember that, I just programmed a reminder that emailed us one week prior indicating that from that she wasn’t supposed to take anti-inflammatory meds during that period. Simple and efficient.

I’ve also been continually using their Pages feature in many different ways. One time I used it to keep a rolling ToDo list for things I needed to do during Annual Training. Another time I used it to keep track of the wines that we like. Another use has been as a shared project tracker. It’s really so easy and modular that you can use it for about whatever you need.

Rarely have I used a product that was so easy, and I dare say fun, that it encouraged me to use it more. Backpack does that to me on a daily basis.

Another thing about pages: each one has its own email. So you can set up a page to email all sorts of information, and Backpack diligently adds that information to the page. Combine that with the ability to easily drag the contents from one page to another, and you can hack out Backpack to be your own Capture and Process Center, GTD style.

I also have been using the Writeboard feature more and more. Writeboards are shareable documents that allow different collaborators to make changes to the document. I’ve used them to log meeting notes and to prepare agendas for teleconferences. I could see using them as a Wiki in a Small Business Structure, although it does have some limitations that wouldn’t make it ideal.

Backpack, again, provides a cohesive, integrated solution by allowing you to share documents for collaboration.

To my pleasant surprise, 37 Signals added another feature that I’ve been wanting but haven’t asked for: The Journal. The Journal is just a place where you can write down what you’re working on so that everyone in your Backpack group knows what’s going on. I think it’ll turn out to be a more productive Twitter.

How I think it’s going to be most useful to me, though, is it’ll give me an easy way to write down what I actually did at the end of the day so that I that I don’t have to remember that I fertilized my rosebushes today - I can just search for “rose”, and as long as I put it in to Backpack, it’ll show what I did to my roses on what day. That’s friggin’ handy.

Yet again, Backpack delivers.

That’s great, but I’ll have to spend time and money to use Backpack…is it worth it?

Switching to any new system like this requires time You have to learn a new way of thinking and teach yourself how to use the system. Learning Backpack has been insanely easy. It’s probably taken me twenty minutes, all together, to figure out how to use it.

However, you can spend a lot of time tinkering with it to figure out new ways to use the service for your context. This feature is a double-edged sword - being able to tailor the service for your actual needs and wants also makes it so that you can spend a lot of time fidgeting with it - but I’d rather have a more modular service that does what I want it to do than one that’s constrainingly fidgetproof.

I suspect what’ll keep most people from really using Backpack is the cost. Though there is a free service available, you’re really not getting the best of Backpack - as it’s a really handy service for integrating family and group activities and information. And to do that, you have to pay a minimum of $12 per month.

However, it’s worth it for my needs, and I have been paying for the service for several months now. Consider it this way: how much of your time do you spend sharing schedules, information, messages, and trying to remember stuff? It saves me at least an hour a month - and my time is worth far more than $12 an hour. Not to mention the sanity saved from not being curtly reminded that I didn’t tell Angela what I was doing.

The way that Backpack can be tailored to an individual or groups needs is a huge feature that makes it hard for me to limit who I would recommend the service to. Backpack is so flexible and modular that it can serve the needs of anyone who needs an integrated place to share calendars, information, reminders, and (recently added) their status with others.

[Update on July 10, 2008: If you have more than 6 people that need to share information, you'll probably want to start integrating some of the features of 37Sig's other services.  At that point, it would be more cost-effective to host your own server somewhere and set-up the information exactly the way you need it. However, that would require at least one person who knew how to set up such a service, but an organization of larger than that will need some organic way to help manage information and scale that structure. More on this in the future...]

Right now, the thing that’s most likely to pull me away from using Backpack is not another online service, but rather the likelihood that I’ll be setting up my own home server. If I do that, though, it’ll be because using Backpack has shown me how having my own flexible, tailored intranet can help me and my family’s productivity.

The Changes I’d Like to See in Backpack

Despite the fact that Backpack is already a really good service, I think it could be even better with the addition of the following features:

• A daily calendar view with beginning and end times

Although the Newsroom (the dashboard where Backpack displays your latest activity and what’s coming up) does a great job of showing you the hard landscape of your day, it doesn’t have end times on the activities. For instance, I know that Angela’s physical therapy appointment is at 1pm and her allergy shot is at 3pm. What time does her physical therapy appointment end? To figure that out, I’d have to return to another source of information - which defeats the purpose of me keeping it in Backpack.

This one should be an easy one, as Backpack is already able to understand the syntax of multiple day events.

• The ability to attach notes and files to reminders

Backpack’s reminder service is really handy and easy to use, but to take it a step further, we need the ability to attach files or notes to them. Having the ability to have a reminder that tells me to call Bill at 3pm while having the agenda for the conversation included with the reminder saves me a few extra steps. Yes, this is simply the ability to time-delay an email to yourself or your group, but it’s a service that can easily be integrated into Backpack.

• Time stamps for listed items

It’s very, very easy to make lists within Backpack - so easy, in fact, you’ll probably want to start making lists of a lot of your important data. One thing a lot of people will likely try is to set up some rolling ToDo list - it works pretty well for that, especially because the list items are draggable on the page (you have to do this yourself to see how addictive it can be).

What keeps it from being the end solution for me is that it doesn’t tell me when that item was completed. For what I do, it’s important to know that I completed this portion of that project on this date rather than some other - to do that, I’d have to go back in and edit the list item to say COMPLETED ON MAY 27th. Clearly, Backpack understands timestamps, for it does it on everything else - I want it to do it on list items, as well.

• The ability to enter status for the past in Journal

Yes, this is a relatively new feature, but since I’ve been using it, I’ve been slightly frustrated that I can’t quite use it the way I want it. When you put in an item, it puts it in under today’s date - but if you did something yesterday and want to put it in that you did it yesterday, you can’t. You have to put it under today’s date. I know the Journal is designed to be used as a current status board, but being able to back enter status would be really helpful - especially if you want to capture working actions done when you’re away from the internet.

A Systematic Review of Backpack

I’d like to end this review with a more systematic summary using the criteria I set out in A Special Theory of Productivity. As a brief recap, in that post I stated that the three functions of Time Management Systems are to help us plan, execute, and evaluate our actions and that the principles of simplicity, usefulness, aesthetic pleasure, connectedness, and cohesiveness make Time Management Systems better or worse.

Backpack wins high marks in its ability to help us plan and evaluate our actions - it would be even better at it with the features requested above. Its interface is simple and aesthetically pleasing, and it’s so useful that many people will have to discipline themselves to not use Backpack to list out their lives.

Until we get a better daily picture, though, Backpack will not be an end all solution for executing one’s tasks. That being the case, it gets lower marks for connectedness and cohesiveness, since to see how those tasks are connected to anything I’ll have to refer to another system. The features requested above will help with this aspect without breaking the simplicity and usability.

Give Backpack a Try (For Free)

I encourage you to give Backpack a try if you haven’t done so already. The banner below will take you directly there so you can see the tour for yourself.  Remember that there is a free trial - if you use it and find that I’m wrong, please come back and call me out.

If you liked this post and would like to see more reviews of Time Management Systems, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!

In A Special Theory of Productivity I mentioned that I that I didn’t think RescueTime worked as a time management solution. That’s too broad and unhelpful of a statement, so I’ll spend some time reviewing RescueTime so you can see how I came to that conclusion.

What is RescueTime supposed to do?

I’ll give two explanations, one from the company site, and one from Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime. The company site says:

RescueTime is a web-based time-management tool that allows you to easily understand how you spend your time. One of the coolest things about RescueTime is that there is NO DATA ENTRY. You install a doohicky on your computer and we magically track all of your time usage.

Tony Wright says:

Right now, we’re (RescueTime) the time management equivalent of a cholesterol test– we can tell you you’re not quite healthy and we can let you know when you’re making progress… But we don’t have a ton to offer to get you fixed up!

(Tony: thanks for visiting and leaving the comment - I intend this to be an extended reply to you. Sorry for the delay.)

The program that is installed on your computer monitors the programs you use and updates those with an online server. You go in on your user Dashboard and tag the programs with the type of activity that you do with the reported programs. After you tag them, you’re done - from that point forward, RescueTime associates that program with that activity.

The webpages you visit are handled much the same way. For instance, if you visit this blog, you may tag it as “blog reading” and “personal development.” For the rest of the time that you run RescueTime, it’ll log time spent on this site as blog reading and personal development. I have to say…that’s pretty nifty.

So, what happens to all that information? It is compiled and beautiful graphs are outputted that shows where you’ve been spending your time (much like the one the used above-update: I tried to embed a chart from my dashboard but I kept getting 404’s from RescueTime. Will try to get that fixed, as the chart is informative). Other nifty reporting features include the ability to assign point values to activities - i.e. writing, as an academic and as a blogger, is probably the most valuable thing I do, and internet surfing one of the least valuable - so that you have beautiful charts that show you how productive you are based on the value of the activities you’ve been doing. RescueTime will also alert you when you have met goals that you have set - so, if you want to spend two hours writing a day, it will let you know via email, SMS, or RSS.

All of these features are easy to set up and work as stated. The last and probably most compelling feature of RescueTime is that it’s free! Yes, all of this time tracking and reporting goodness for free.

In conclusion, RescueTime is a free, easy to use time management system that displays beautiful reports of your activities that allow you to quickly evaluate your productivity. It simply provides the best looking graphs and charts that I have seen from any product in this niche.

So, what’s not to like about RescueTime?

You may be thinking that something’s gone awry, since I’ve both praised RescueTime and said that I don’t think it works as a time management solution. My main critique about RescueTime is regarding its usefulness and cohesiveness.

Before I begin to evaluate it, remember the framework that I’m using to do so. The functions of Time Management Systems are to help you Plan, Execute, and Evaluate your work, and the principles that make these systems better are Simplicity, Usefulness, Aesthetics, Connectedness, and Cohesiveness. (If none of this makes sense to you, read A Special Theory of Productivity for more information.)

I’ve already commented that RescueTime is simple and aesthetically very pleasing. Good work on that front, guys. But I do have some major concerns about the program…

One Tag to Rule Them All

My major concern is how useful RescueTime is. It’s often the case that there is some tension between simplicity and usefulness, and RescueTime is a brilliant case in point. A real world example is in order.

I write almost everything in Textmate. When I visit another blog and start writing a longish comment, I pop open Textmate, do the writing, and then copy back to the site. When I’m drafting blog posts, I do it in Textmate. I’m even drafting my academic papers in Textmate. That amounts to a lot of writing, and RescueTime has perfectly tracked that.

But it has tracked it as “writing.” The problem: not everything I write has the same productivity value. My academic writing has far more weight than my blog writing, though my actual habits may prove otherwise. Furthermore, RescueTime doesn’t track what I was writing, so to figure that out, I’d have to refer to some other Time Management System, which hurts it on the cohesiveness front.

I may be anal, but it’s useful to know what days and times I was working on certain projects. Knowing that helps me see trends and helps me plan future tasks. As it stands, RescueTime outputs beautiful graphs and charts that, while interesting, aren’t useful. Using RescueTime, then, is adding another layer to all of the other Time Management Systems that I currently employ…all for beautiful charts and graphs.

The Textmate example is just one of many that have the same feature. I read the same sites often times for different reasons. For example, sometimes I read Lifehack just to see what Dustin Wax is baiting me with. (Okay, he doesn’t even know I exist, but he baits me anyways.) Other times, I’m reading the site to see whether they’ve written about something I’m writing about. One of the activities involves just blog reading, whereas the other is research. Other site activities include networking and marketing.

Unfortunately, RescueTime sticks with the original way I’ve tagged it. You can go back and change your tags, but then it will stick with those tags. It can’t see the difference between reading, research, networking, and marketing. But there are very important differences between those activities that are directly related to productivity.

Of course, one option would be to use different programs for different functions. I don’t have the tagging problem with Mellel, for I only use it to polish academic papers. So, I could conceivable split tasks, but why trade using one tool (Textmate) that helps with my productivity just so I can track what I’m doing?

The Care and Feeding Of RescueTime

Directly related to the tagging problem is the fact that I’m a linkhopper. When I read blog posts, I jump to people’s blogs when they leave good comments (I’ve found some of my best blog buddies that way.) That means that when I go to my RescueTime dashboard, I have to tag all of those new sites. If you do it often enough, it’s pretty easy to do and only takes five or ten minutes. Forget to update your Dashboard, though, and you end up with a few scores of sites to tag, which takes considerably longer and is not really that accurate, since I often can’t remember what I was doing there.

I also test out a lot of different software for both personal and blogging interests. So that gives me yet another bunch of applications to tag, which leads to more productivity seepage as I’m trying to figure out what I was doing.

What I’ve found is that my options using RescueTime is either to spend 10-15 minute a day of productivity overhead tagging what I’m doing or to have a high amount of untagged activities. But, for the program to be remotely useful, you have to tag what you’re doing.

What about Off-Computer Tasks and Projects?

Another major concern I have is that RescueTime can’t (without third party solutions that marginally help) track off-computer work. Phone calls, meetings, book research, yard work, errands, etc. all are things that are productive and could bear some tracking. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get them into RescueTime’s system, so to track your real productivity, you’d have to use RescueTime plus some other solution. To be fair, the creators of RescueTime don’t claim that it can do this, so it’s not as if they’re being misleading - it is, nonetheless, a critical component of our productivity that RescueTime does not help with.

Summary Evaluation

1. Does RescueTime help you plan how to use your time?

To a very small degree, yes. I say that because if you find that how you think you’re using your time and how you’re actually using your time is quite different, you can use RescueTime to help you adjust your time. Presuming you can discern different activities by tagging them properly, which I’ve yet to really manage to do.

2. Does RescueTime help you execute your tasks?

Only to the degree that your planning subverts unproductive habits. Also note that the care and feeding of RescueTime may not be a good return on investment of time.

3. Does RescueTime help you evaluate what you’ve been doing and provide useful information for future planning and execution?

Not by itself. The system would require you to have some other system that’s tracking the tasks and projects that you’re doing in order for its information to be really useful. If you have that other system, and you’re able to sync the information that it and RescueTime are producing, RescueTime may prove to be useful as a reporting tool.

4. What is RescueTime intended to replace?

This is not really part of the framework I listed in A Special Theory of Productivity, but I take it that RescueTime is intended to replace the manual input of time a la Freshbooks. It’s a pain in the ass filling in time sheets and keeping track of where you spend your time as you’re doing it, and having a system that does this without data entry would be incredibly helpful. However, as I’ve stated above, you’re going have to track your projects and tasks some way or the other, so the only point I see of RescueTime on this front is as a reality check. But that reality check would have to extrapolate what you’re doing (i.e. tasks and projects) from how you’re doing it (i.e. the sites and applications you use).

The Way Ahead For RescueTime

I hate when people just critique a product without making suggestions. Complaining is easy…providing solutions is far harder and much more useful. RescueTime is a work in progress, and they are adding new features to it monthly. Here are some things I think would make the program better - there will be some redundancy here since my critique has already listed what I don’t like about RescueTime. (I’m shooting myself in the foot here, as some of these are what I’d do if I were currently building software, and if Tony takes the suggestions to heart and implements them, I will then be fighting him for patent uses once I generate enough revenue to get those projects going. Ah well - maybe he’ll be nice if that becomes an issue.)

1. Implement a Tagging Filter

I couldn’t think of a really catchy way to say this one. Right now, RescueTime uses the applications and sites that the user visits or uses as the filter to determine what that user was doing. Rather than doing it that way, you could allow the user to specify times that the user was doing a certain tasks.

So, for example, I could allocate the block from 0600-0900 as “Working on RescueTime Evaluation.” All of the different sites and applications that were used during that time block then provide the information of how I accomplished that task. As a project manager, I could then see that, while my employee claimed they were working on Project X, they were actually on MySpace.

I could then tag that task with different metatags that indicate what area of work it fell under. The above task would fall under Blogging, and all of the subtasks indicate the different actions required to sustain that metaproject.

2. Implement an Alert for Untagged Activities

It may be helpful to alert the user that they have a certain number (say, 10) of untagged activities that need to be tagged. That way the user can work natively without the thought of “man, I need to remember what this is and go tag it.” Perhaps a report could be emailed saying “between X and Y times you were using these untagged applications and visiting these untagged sites. What were you doing?”

3. Implement an Off-Computer Applet

This one should be fairly easy given that there are already some third party applications that allow you to have up to three offline activities. Using the ideas from the solution above would make this pretty seamless.

Different and More Positive Perspectives on RescueTime

James from Men with Pens writes:

The beauty of Rescue Time is that with least effort on my part, I have a beautiful graph of my work habits – and within minutes of installation, if I feel like it. I’ll be able to see exactly where my time goes (and not where I think it goes) and I’ll see precisely how much of my time I spend on individual tasks.

If you’re into productivity, then you can’t go wrong with Rescue Time. It’s a damned nifty lifesaver… or should I say timesaver?

T.W. Garrett from TheTechBrief says:

RescueTime is set to offer a time management goal tool and the option for comparison against others in your industry for those who are serious about increasing their efficiency and finally getting a handle on their technology-driven life. I give RescueTime and A+ and I look forward to the full product release.

Scott from WebWorkerDaily says:

RescueTime is great for examining my overall productivity and helping me make sure that I am putting the proper amount of time into those areas that require my attention. I use it for big picture analysis but the tools for more detailed examinations are certainly present.

I thought it would be good to add their perspectives, since they’re a bit more positive in their reviews than I am.

If you liked this post and would like to see more reviews of Time Management Systems, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!

There’s a new money transfer game in town besides Paypal, and they want your membership so much so that they are giving $25 for you just to sign up. There are no strings attached, no obligations to use the service, no trial offers that you need to remember to quit, and the process is really quick.

Actually, to be correct, I should say that you make $35, because I get $10 for every one of you that sign up - so, even if you don’t use the service, consider it as a donation that you actually get paid to give. If you don’t need to know anymore than that to get your easy $25, then click this link and sign up for Revolution Money Exchange.

Okay, so you may want to know more information if you’re still reading this. There are a lot of things I don’t like about Paypal, but the biggest thing I don’t like about it is that the recipient of the transfer is charged Paypal’s processing fee. For instance, if you were to send me $20, Paypal takes $.88. Larger amounts of money come with a larger percentage of the cut. Not cool.

Revolution Money Exchange doesn’t do that. There’s no charge for either sending or receiving money. This makes it a great service for friends, families, and non-profits, as the full amount of money is received on either end.

I believe in this service so much so that I’m a) writing about it and b) going to put it as my primary link for donations. Paypal will still be there, unfortunately, but only because I think so few people know about Revolution Money Exchange.

I appreciate your time and consideration. Sign up for Money Exchange by clicking the link. The offer is only good until April 15th, so hurry to sign up if you haven’t yet.

(Don’t forget to switch to Productive Flourishing’s new feed, if you haven’t done so already. Click here and your browser will do the rest of the work.)

Joel over at Lifehack gives a bit longer survey of good leadership traits. It seemed to me that he hit all of the major points I talked about in yesterday’s post, sans the picture with the stooge in glasses.

Apparently leadership is on the hive brain.

I was stumbling recently and came across Pandora, a website that streams free music and analyzes, groups, and sorts the music based upon the song’s attributes. I absolutely love it. Here’s why:

It’s free

Who doesn’t like free music? ‘Nuff said.

It helps you find new music without you having listening to crap

I love finding and supporting new artists; I hate listening to the crap that comes on the radio from artists that I’d rather see used during governmental attempts to get people to leave the compound.
There’s actually two ways you can use this to find music:

• Find new music by focusing on artists you know and love.

  Most of us have a few staple artists that we listen to day in and out. I do the best I can to not listen to the same people over and over again, but I only have so much music, and I don’t want to listen to the aforementioned crap. Plug these artist into Pandora, and you get to listen to something different that has very similar musical qualities to the music you already love.

  Find new music by focusing on an artist or genre you kind of like but are unfamiliar with.

  New to blues but kind of dig Muddy Waters? Type in “Muddy Waters” into Pandora and see what comes up. You’ll likely expand your musical universe considerably by doing this, even if you only succeed in figuring out that you don’t like particular artists.

You can help become part of the musical research, cataloging, and exploration

While you’re listening to songs, you can tell Pandora whether you like or don’t like songs. Doing this helps the project refine their analyses so that their categorizing becomes better. So, while you’re listening and blogging away, you can give back to someone else’s project. It’s like helping medical research without signing all those forms and pesky side effects.

There’s a free version supported by ads and a paid version for $36. I’m going to give it a few weeks of listening before I pay, but I have no doubt that I’ll end up dropping down the dough since it’s such a good service. Head over to Pandora and give it a try.