If you've never heard of the site Pandora.com, quit reading this, put on your headphones and go there now.
OK now that you're back you've realized what a site you've been missing. Simply type in a song, artist, or genre and Pandora creates a "radio" station for you based on the information.
I've been using Pandora for around 6 months and I love it, it's introduced me to a ton of new music. If you hear something you like you can use links to buy from Amazon or ITunes, or you can bookmark the artist or song and return to it later.
If you have an IPhone, Pandora has an application you need to download. The Pandora App gives you a great IPhone interface. I even listen to it over my car's audio system and it works great on AT&T's Edge network.
Bottom line, Pandora's free and will give you endless hours of listening enjoyment.
Over the past few years I've gone from no movie rental membership to Blockbuster's mail service, to Netflix, back to Blockbuster's mail service.
I like the idea of doing my rental business by mail. And with Blockbuster you get to exchange the mail-in DVDs for movies at their stores. I switched to Netflix briefly because I wanted to try their streaming movie service. It worked pretty well, but the movie selection about a year and a half ago when I tried it wasn't that great so I went back to Blockbuster.
Over the past few years Blockbuster has more than doubled the monthly subscription for my plan, which allows me 3 movies by mail at a time and 5 in store returns.
Both Blockbuster and Netflixare offering settop boxes now that allow you to rent over wifi, you can even use your XBOX 360 or Playstation 3 to rent, buy, and watch movies. I like this idea, heck it's the future of movie renting. But, I don't know if a box is going to be the delivery system, or if it's going to be through your computer to your TV, straight to equipped TVs or whatever.
Apple TV will do the job, but the pricing structure through Itunes is a little steep for me right now.
So here's the dilemna; I want to post video reviews. That is I record a review for you to play from an embedded movie player here on the website. But which video site should I use, Youtube or Vimeo. It's a tough call.
I spent part of an afternoon uploading the same piece of video to both using similar settings. To be honest, I can't tell that much difference in quality.
Youtube's upload process of my 12mb movie file took a little less than 10 minutes, while Vimeo's was closer to 5.
Youtube encodes video in Flash and in the h.264. Vimeo is Flash only. This is where I feel the need to stick with Youtube. People can watch the uploaded videos on their Iphones. It's also a part of Google. That means easier integration into other Google applications.
That said I really like Vimeo, it's very smooth, and it has an option to upload HD video. There is a workaround to watch Vimeo, or any other flash based video on iphone, which is actually kind of cool and involves creating an iphone site to show your transformed flash based videos. But it's an extra step none the less. So for now I'm going to post to both, which one ends up on here just depends on which way the wind's blowing.
Below I posted the same video in both Youtube and Vimeo, which do you like best, which do you use and why? (By the way the video is of my baby girl's first week of walking, ain't she cute?)
