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...