Personalized streaming radio is awesome. WIth a host of applications and all sorts of capabilities to choose from, it’s hard to see how a brand new one will address needs that aren’t already being met. Jogli.com brings us a service through which you can find and play 500 million songs, allowing even your most obscure tastes a free listening option. An important feature here is full albums. You might spend some time finding all the songs from your favorite LP on YouTube, but Jogli compiles the albums for you, often with the accompanying video. There is no subscription and all your listening is totally free. While it’s still in simple form, it’s easy to use and utilizes an extensive cataloge, leading us to expect great things from this fledgling service.

One look at the WHITEvoid homepage and you can understand why it was FWA's site of the day this past Friday. The Berlin-based interactive art and design firm gives you the total package in a matter of speaking; they only ask that you click to open that package before a veritable Pandora's box featuring their top-notch creative work is unleashed. The outstanding interactive installations and products the company has created for exhibitions, trade, festivals, events, concerts, and clubs are offered up on visually stunning platter and arranged neatly into seven categories and twenty items overall, that seem to just be floating in what else but a white void. Their creative genius is no secret as WHITEvoid counts both The BMW Group and The Jewish Museum of Berlin among their wide range of past clients. Maybe it's time you entered the White Void and discovered a new dimension of creativity for yourself.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the folks at eCool love our Design Showcase as much as we do; week after week they share their incredible finds with us — and you. This time around, it’s the collaboration of Pandora Design with Guilio Iacchetti, which resulted in some very kitschy souvenirs for tourists visiting Italy from here on out; Iacchetti took mundane objects such as juicers and fly swatters, melded them together with notable Italian maps and architecture and created updated versions that you’d be totally stoked to get from Grandma upon returning from her annual jaunt to St. Peter’s. We think you should join eCool in the fun and submit your finds now.

I rely on both Pandora and Yahoo! Music on a daily basis to listen to streaming music. Both sites offer their services for free and are excellent at what they do. Since I found them I have been liberated from the confines of my music library and from the need to constantly try to augment said library…so imagine my dismay when I loaded both sites today and found that they had gone silent.

Pandora and Yahoo!, along with many, many others have halted their services today in protest of a March 2 ruling by the congressionally-appointed Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) to raise the royalty rates that internet radio stations must pay to stream music. The ruling stipulates a rate increase of between 300 and 1200 percent over the next 5 years. According to the SaveNetRadio coalition, a group representing the stations, this raise will make it nearly impossible for smaller stations to stay in business.

To make matters even worse for the stations, this year’s smaller (but still substantial) royalty hike has been made retroactive to January 1, 2006, meaning that internet stations have suddenly found themselves at loose ends to pay 18 months worth of back royalty fees that they didn’t know they would have to pay. If the royalty hike is not overturned, every day might be a day of silence on the internet.

For more information on the issue read the clear-headed BBC article, and to join in the effort to save internet radio go to SaveNetRadio.org.

–Dan Steckenberg

When Pandora came out, I was instantaneously addicted and I’m not afraid to admit it. I loved that I could type in a certain artist or song name, and it would analyze my choice and spit closely-fitted music back at me. Musicovery is like Pandora in the way that you are ultimately at the mercy of their algorithm or whatever their music choosing method is, but it allows you more discretion than Pandora. You can choose music by genre, era, popularity, dance beat, and by mood (by selecting a point on a four axis matrix blending dark, positive, energetic, and calm moods). Once you make your set your criteria, your playlist is displayed in an animated spider web-esque trail on your screen. I have been experimenting with Musicovery all morning, and it has definitely thrown me some great picks (more eclectic and international than I expected).

This is by no means ‘new’, but was far too good to never mention. Often playing the role of music maven among my group of peers, I find it difficult answering the question, “How would you describe the music?” Much like fine wine, a espresso brew, or bittersweet chocolate, the words used to describe a band or song is completely subjective. With so much variance, it would be difficult to do any sort of meaningful data manipulation. Six years ago, a group of musicians and technologists came together to create a comprehensive analysis of music. 10,000 songs later, the Music Genome project has produced Pandora. The free service is straightforward. You simply enter in an artist or song title. It then returns a precise description of the music, plays you an example, and asks if it’s what you had in mind. A simple thumbs up for approval and a playlist is generated for you with songs that match the characteristics you are looking for. Whether you are seeking new music recommendations or want some variety outside of your iTunes playlist, Pandora is one box you’ll want to open.