Andrew Godwin’s LastGraph is a clever tool which allows you to produce information graphics from your last.fm data.

The service’s coolest feature allows you to create a PDF (or SVG) poster of your listening history between two dates. Here’s mine from August 08 to today:


See a larger version

The fancy visualisation technique for the posters originally came from Lee Byron’s “What have I been listening to?” project.

The site also offers some premium features which allow you to hotlink graphs for inclusion in your own website (as well as helping out the project) for only £5 (or $10) a year.

Tumbltape is a brilliantly simple service which takes a Tumblelog and turns it into a playlist. For those of you wondering what the hell a Tumblelog is, it’s a type of blog which consists of short messages, pictures, music and video rather than the lengthier posts found on your traditional blog.

The combination works particularly well with my friend Laura KP’s blog, as she posts a lot of music. Check out the result here. I love it when things like this just work as if by magic.

It's been a little while since a music related online service has come along which has made me drop everything and rush to try it out and find out more. MoreCowbell.dj is that thing. The service is a spin off of US tv show Saturday Night Live, where a special show featured Will Ferrell as Gene Frenkle, the cowbell player, and Christopher Walken as the music producer, Bruce Dickenson. It's simple but sure-to-be-massive mechanic allows users to add a variable amount of cowbell (and optional Walken) to any track they upload. They can then embed the newly modified track as a widget in their blog, social network profile etc. Here's one I made earlier:

The really exciting thing about MoreCowbell.dj is not the service itself, but the set of APIs that it's been built on. The Echonest provide a range of APIs which enable developers to build their own digital music applications without the need for expensive servers loaded with clever custom music software. Developers can use the service to analyse tracks and return important information like beats per minute and time signature which will undoubtedly lead to a whole raft of new browser based music apps.

I'm not going to talk about this at length as Paul Glazowski has already done the job at Mashable, but I would like to express my concern at the recent trend in bands and artists creating their own social networks. The most high profile of these have been Radiohead's W.A.S.T.E. Central and 50 Cent’s thisis50.com.

I'm all in favour of bands creating and nurturing communities around their official sites – this has been happening for years with artist forums, and has grown to include commenting and user generated content such as photos and fan remixes.

It's possible that if OpenSocial takes off then this kind of fragmentation of the social web will be easier to manage – but until then it makes sense to engage with your fan base on the existing (and hugely popular) social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. We only just got everyone together in one place – why leave so soon?

I was in the pub last night, when a heated discussion broke out. It centered around which, with hindsight, were your top 5 albums of the 90’s. The discussion ended with a challenge – to produce by 12am today, a definitive top 5. I've recently been fooling around with Mixwit, so I suggested that not only should each of us produce a list, but that we should also create a digital mixtape of 5 tracks, one from each of our chosen records.

So here's mine...

...and those top 5 albums in order are:

Portishead – Dummy
Autechre – Tri Repeatae
A Guy Called Gerald – Black Secret Technology
Squarepusher – Hard Normal Daddy
Weezer – Weezer

Mixwit is powered by Seeqpod, a music search and streaming service which indexes any mp3s it finds publicly available on the web. The Mixwit service itself is in the very early stages of beta, and while it's definitely a bit ropey, it's simple and fun. There's also the problem that none of the artists whose tracks are currently available on Seeqpod will ever see any money for their use. Assuming these legal issues get ironed out, however, I reckon the mixtape has a bright future online. It gets back to the heart of why people love music and why they want to share it with their friends.