Jared W. Smith

I’ve been taking a closer look at my last.fm statistics, and it’s been interesting watching the trends evolve. Most notably, there is definitely evidence of my trending away from a smooth jazz/newage/Weather Channel phase back to a more mainstream hard rock selection of music again. read more »

I’ve been running across some neat stuff on the ‘Nets these days, such as…

• The redesigned last.fm. It’s really improved; the social networking aspects are far stronger now, as friend requests are actually highlighted better, and they’re even adding a little News Feed-like action. It’s also nice that I can see my loved tracks (I do a lot of lovin’ on last.fm). My favorite part? The graphical breakdowns now are more than just “last week” and “overall” — you can get breakdowns from a year, six months, and three months as well. Killer; helps me identify a lot of musical trends. Check mine out and maybe even friend me!
• Fail We Can Believe In. This Obamaized Fail Whale graphic is oddly appropriate seeing how Twitter took a dump in the last couple days and screwed a lot of people’s follower/following lists up. They’ve been getting those restored, but the whale still reigns supreme. (More on Twitter’s barf in a later post, this one is supposed to be positive!)
• The Tropical Weather FriendFeed Room. This FriendFeed room pulls in feeds from the National Hurricane Center as well as Dr. Jeff Masters’ tropical blog on Weather Underground into an easy-to-follow, and easy-to-discuss format that FriendFeed is great for. It’s been a wonderful time-saver with the recent tropical activity in the Atlantic.
• Identi.ca, the open-source, federated Twitter-like network. If things keep progressing at the pace they’re progressing, Identi.ca could stand a serious challenge to Twitter. They are adding features at a monstrous pace, and was just added as the latest supported microblogging service in Twhirl. Best part? Anybody can run the software powering Identi.ca (it’s called Laconica), making for a truly federated microblogging platform.

Seen anything you’ve liked lately? Throw it in comments. :)

I was taking a peek at my Last.fm statistics to see how many times I’ve listened to Trammell Starks this week when I saw this in the sidebar and convulsed:

C’mon now…