Okay, I hope it's not cheating for me to write about a site I was already familiar with, but I was so surprised and pleased when I clicked on the winners list of the Web 2.0 awards to find that one of my favorite sites, Pandora, won top honors for the music category!!
It totally deserves it. The site originally started as the Human Genome Project, and after they realized their classification system of music could be turned pretty easily into a predicter of musical tastes, Pandora was born.
The best thing about Pandora is that it helps you discover new music you might not have otherwise known about. The more you use it, the more "intelligent" it gets at predicting your tastes. It's kind of like having a personal music advisor right in your computer, and you can tap into it any time. By a system of 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' approvals, you can either accept or reject their suggestions of music you might like, and if you say you really hate something, they'll never play it again.
Sites like this are in danger because legislation is being pushed to start taxing streaming music sites, and a lot of these online resources are run by small companies with no more than a half a dozen people, start-ups who had a great idea and took advantage of the World Wide Web to get a business started. It would be a shame to see resources such as these go out of business because they crack under heavy taxation.
Pandora is user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and serves a great purpose for those of us who are always looking for that next new artist to try out. Getting to play around with it at work was a joy; almost as much fun as playing around with it at home.
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