Epinions comes now with RSS feeds

I'm glad to announce that Epinions has now integrated RSS feed functions to many many pages. This is a great opportunity to keep informed of new reviews posted on the site without even signing up to Epinions.

There are basically two choices:
1) to stay informed of any reviews posted by an author
2) to stay informed of any reviews posted about a product

You will find the feeds on the product or user profile pages.

You do have the possibility to subscribe to as many feeds as you can handle and you can of course subscribe to both types of feeds.

(RSS feeds are compatible with recent browsers such as Firefox 2.0, RSS readers, or web based tools such as My Yahoo! or Netvibes.)

Pandora

I'd like to present you an Internet Radio Station that is a bit different from most other net radio stations, because it allows you to create your "own" radio stations, according to artists or tracks you like.

As you may have guessed according to the title, this station is called Pandora and you'll find it here. So how does it work? Simply type the name of an artist or an album track and Pandora will chose tracks you should like, and very often some tracks of the chosen artist. Therefore Pandora allows you to make yourself a first opinion about artists you have heard of and also to learn about similar artists.

Sounds great, but there are some cons too. The first is that you have to sign up for free after about half an hour and the second is that you have to reside in the USA, since you have to state your Zip Code.

Progressive Rock Site

Today I've stumbled on an interesting progressive rock site. It is called Prog Archives and the URL is http://www.progarchives.com/.

I must admit that I don't quite agree with their Top 100 album list that features Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis (sic!) as the creators of the 5 best progressive rock albums.

On the other hand the site contains technical information and reviews of a great amount of prog rock albums. The reviews are generally not as exhaustive as on Epinions, but I guess that Prog Archives will often have reviews of albums that haven't been reviewed on Epinions.

Writing for Epinions Again

To my great surprise I finally managed to write a new review for Epinions, the first one after more than a year. The review was about the David Sylvian Best of compilation Everything and Nothing that I bought some weeks ago on eBay.

I was particularly happy to get some comments from persons that came across my reviews for the first time. I really should leave more comments to other people's reviews and try to reply whenever I get a comment.

I'm already looking forward to writing another review, but the choice of an album to review is a tricky question. Some possible candidates (for instance Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea) have already been reviewed by very talented epinions authors, some are waiting to be reviewed for quite a while (for instance Tago Mago) and I don't quite know how to write a review about them...

life in korea

As you may have noticed, I do love music, but I do love photography too. So here's a link to a photo blog that I've stumbled upon with blogger's Next Blog button a few days ago and that I check out almost every day: life in korea

Enjoy!

My turntable

It shouldn't be a huge surprise that I've been in the attic to fetch my turntable, since I've been reading and writing a lot about vinyl records during the last few days. I wouldn't consider myself as a collector, but I still own about 100 vinyl records. Most of them were bought in the eighties and even if my taste has evolved since then, I still appreciate listening to most of them.

My own music reviews

OK, I just wanted to let you know something. I guess that some people who get here might wonder why I read and comment music blogs without writing any reviews myself.

I've been a member of Epinions since Fall 2000 and I've written 30 music reviews, many of them about previously unreviewed albums and I don't feel like deleting these reviews or pasting them into this blog. Please feel free to check out my reviews here. On my epinions profile, you will find links to many more writers and most of them are specialized in the field of music.

Yet another Music Blog

Carl (cf. my last blog entry) does have a nice LP collection, but if you are looking for something really crazy, check out 20th Century Music, Ron Kane's blog. He has lots of interesting LPs, singles and CDs from Ryuichi Sakamoto to CAN. Frankly, I'm not sure to own a single album he doesn't have, or if I do, it might well be one of my On-U Sound reggae albums or thinks like Hail or Simon Fisher Turner. This guy could open a museum or an archive for a big radio station!

Interesting Music Blog

Do you still own a turntable? Or maybe I should ask: Did you ever own a turntable? What, you don't even know what a turntable is? Well ok, way back in the last century, CDs, MP3s, home computers didn't even exist, but people were already listening to recorded music. They used big discs, the so-called vinyl records, turning at 33 or 45 rpm that were read by a needle and electrically amplified by the above mentioned turntable.

Anyway, some people still have vinyl records and one of these folks is presenting them here. By the way, his name is Carl.

How confusing!

Hello everybody,

I didn't feel like leaving you guys out, so I created this blog for all english speaking folks. I don't know yet if I'll write on here very often, but I wanted to create this blog in order to add some links to blogs I like and also to avoid messing up my french and german blog with english posts and comments.

The title of this blog (please note the "-" between "next" and "blog") is of course a hint to blogger's great toolbar function with the same name, but also to the fact that this blog is already the fourth blog I've created this month.