The Studio

MySpace… totally dead, right?  Perhaps Facebook has taken over the online social scene, but MySpace has found a niche that may help it survive. That niche is music.

MySpace Music is surprisingly good, mostly because lots of bands are using it as a defacto website.  It has videos, playlists, news, charts, and much more.

Would I use instead of Last.fm, Pandora, Songza, or Grooveshark?  Not likely.  It is still Myspace and all the garish advertisements are just as annoying but it isn’t bad.  Check it out, perhaps you will like it.

Anybody who doesn’t mind watching movies on a computer screen should navigate over to Speedcine.com.  Speedcine’s purpose is simple, to search  many movie databases to find a particular movie.  Best of all it searches free resources such as Hulu as well as paid ones like Amazon.  Now you are not going to find a free version of recently released movies such as Avatar or movies recently released to DVD such as the Hangover.  But you will find movies such as Supersize Me and The Naked Gun 33 1/3.

My preference is to click on a letter, click on only free movies, and scroll through to till I find something interesting.

It is now easier than ever to find music online.  Google has recently released Google Music Search, a means of searching for songs, lyrics, and artists using Google’s unparalleled search engine.  Google music will even connect with full length (no annoying snippets) of songs from other websites such as Rhapsody, Pandora, imeen, MySpace music and others.  Oddly, it doesn’t link to my favorite music search engines Grooveshark or Songza.

Watch this video describing what Google Music Search can do.

I like the Google Music Search but at this point it comes well behind Grooveshark and Songza for my needs.  Grooveshark and Songza require less clicks to get to a song/artist and don’t require you to jump to other annoying websites to get to the meat.  But, then again, that is what a search engines is all about – getting you to other sites. Perhaps if I didn’t know about better resources, then Google Music Search would be more valuable.

Cross posted from The Radar.

Songza is a Google-esque search engine designed specifically for music. Type in a song title or artist name and it will spit out a list of songs. What makes this site so very excellent is the huge selection of music and just as importantly each song is played in its entirety. No more listening to only 40 seconds of a song and then a fade-out to nothing.

It is possible but not necessary to create and save songs to a profile. The saved songs will become a playlist which you can reorder and shuffle.  The profile will produce an RSS feed so friends and/or interested people can receive updates on songs you enjoy. You can follow my song selection @ http://songza.com/chesslibrarian/rss if you want.

Songza is fun but it isn’t perfect. Sometimes the songs lag a little. Unlike Pandora it does not stream new music to you.  Songza does not allow downloading of songs.

Songza is incredible for what it is does and I highly recommend playing with it!

Criticker is a new movie recommendation website along the lines of the previously reviewed Clerk Dogs.  You submit a review between 0-100 of ten movies and Criticker will match you with other members that have ranked movies similarly.  Then it is possible to look at other movies they loved  and learn about some new movies. Criticker calls this TCI (Taste Compatibility Index).  For example, after inputting my 10 movies I looked at a user with similar tastes.  One of his/her top movies was The Life and Death of Peter Sellers which seems like a movie I might really enjoy.

Criticker also has lots of social options such as forums and movie lists.

Try it and let me  know what you think.

Great news!

It is now possible to have alerts about series/actor/director/language you are interested in sent via RSS.

For example, if you are interested in the movies in Hindi (see the first image) after performing a search  click on the RSS chicklet (circled in red on the right hand side) and subscribe (second image).  This means that whenever we get a new movie in Hindi or with Brad Pitt or whatever is your passion an alert will be sent to your RSS aggregator such as Google Reader.

I am loving Grooveshark and I think you will as well.

The Grooveshark website allows you to listen to music through the internet. I stumbled upon this site while preparing to teach Listening to Music Online (click here to see the slides from that presentation).

Grooveshark’s greatness stems from you being enabled  to pick particular songs and even particular albums to listen to (I am currently listening most of  Leonard Cohen’s works).  Similar music search websites such as the very cool Songza will enable you to find one song but not stream an entire album.

Grooveshark even has a recommendation system.  For example, if you like the Pixies you may also like the Breeders, Modest Mouse, etc.  This is not an unusual feature for this type of site but really isn’t its strong point.

Give Grooveshark a shot.

Have you ever left the cimema wondering just where that beautiful scene was shot? Well now you can find out all you need to know with just a few clicks!

Famous Locations is a great resourse: search by location or by movie to see pictures and find out about all the locations featured in a film or all the movies or TV programmes made at any particular place.  You can also add or edit the info and pictures yourself. It’s free to join.  Google Mash Up map technology on location pages enables you to view that location and other locations in the area.

Has anybody tried the new movie picking website Clerk Dogs?  The technology blogosphere was discussing this website recently and I wanted to give it a shot.

Basically it is a recommendation engine along the lines of the awesome music sites Pandora/Last.fm but for movies.  Type in a title of a movie you have enjoyed and it will try to bring up like movies.  Simple enough sounding but it is often difficult to match a person with a movie.

The first movie I tried was Sin City.  The matches received were Sin City (less than an inspired guess by Clerk Dogs) and Sin City 2 which I didn’t even know was in the works.   I then tried Stardust and Clerk Dogs suggested The Princess Bride (good one), Willow (still good), Ever After (never saw it, maybe I should), Labrynith (I remember thinking David Bowie moving around the little glass ball was way cool), and more.  I then tried SpaceBalls with no hits.  I would think that would be an easy one with all the other Mel Brooks films.

Clerk Dogs is still in beta so I give it a pass for now, but it will be interesting to see what it will it will be like in the future.  If anybody else has tried it let me know your results, stellar or less.