No Parent Left Behind

Do you have any idea what Pandora Radio is? Well if you don’t, let me be the first to tell you that you are severely behind the times. At least by a year. But that’s ok, no need to feel bad, that’s why we write articles like this… to get you a bit more savvy with technology. So let’s open this little Internet Radio package and take a peek to see how it will change your life… or at least the amount of bandwidth that you use at work.

So, Pandora Radio is a great little online radio program that is different from all the other radio programs in that it “gets to know you”… kind of creepy huh? Not really. You see you make a new playlist based on say a band that you like. I picked the Cranberry’s since it’s Thanksgiving and all… seemed fitting and Pandora takes it from there. Ussually it will play a track from the artist you picked first and then start to expand from there to similar music. If it plays a song that you really like you can give it a “thumbs up”, if you don’t like a song that it played (like the one that is playing right now from Coldplay) then you can give it a thumbs down. When you give it a thumbs down, Pandora doesn’t play it anymore. The more “thumbs ups/downs” that you enter the better it gets at telling your musical preferences. Pandora uses the global Pandora community to help you, and you help others, to hear music that you like but may never have heard of before.

Pandora started as part of the Music Genome Project that used a lot of complex computer stuff to sort out music into different styles and such. Check it out on wikipedia if you want some more info, see the last links section.

This summer, July 2008, Pandora launched a version of thier service for the IPhone. If you have an IPhone (I take back that comment about you being behind the times) you can find the Pandora Radio app on the ITunes apps store.

Not much else to tell you here. Just go to Pandora, sign up, and start to listen! Oh… Quick caveat, if you are listening over a dial-up connection forget it. Also is you are at work, it may slow down the network since is takes a lot of bits, bytes, and such to run this program across the Internet. Your work may have it blocked.

Other than that, have a great day and enjoy listening… wait! Is that Jewl playing on my Cranberry’s list?! I thought she was on some country version of American Idol now? Sorry, got to go… I need to go give Jewl a “thumbs down”.