Helpful links

Okay, so I've got a little playtime this afternoon and I've found some potentially useful sites. Thought I'd share them and see if anyone else finds them helpful.

First, there's FolderShare. Back in my early days of heavy internet usage there seemed to be lots of free file storage sites on the web. Over time, though, they all seemed to convert to paid sites. FolderShare is a bit different. First, it's not a file storage site. No, somehow it links all your computers and then allows you to access files on any of them. The cool thing is that when you make a change to the file on one of the computers, it's changed on all of them. This could be disastrous, but I could have used this when I was using some version of a file storage site to work on research papers or tests. I'd always have to make sure I had the most up-to-date version on each computer. It got very confusing. I haven't really done too much with this yet, but I'm assuming each computer needs to be turned on and connected to the net for it to work. Still, if I'm trying to access files from my work computer while at home, I don't see that as a problem.

Next is Citation Machine. This would have been more useful to me when I was in school, but it still could be handy. Basically you type in the information about a source and Citation Machine will show you the proper format for a bibliography. It does MLA and some other styles. The one thing that I think might be particularly useful is that it does non-traditional sources such as websites and television interviews. I shared this with my students and figured I'd pass it along to y'all.

Finally, I just found Pandora. Though the name scares me a bit, I think this might be pretty cool. You enter an artist or song you like and Pandora will search out and play similar artists/songs. I've seen other sites that do this, but I think this one might work better than most. For one thing, you can type in other artists and songs to give the station some guidance. You can also give a song a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to give Pandora some hints about your musical tastes. It seems to be pretty flexible. Oh, and when you vote "thumbs down", Pandora skips to another song so you don't have to sit through a song you don't like. That seems logical, but some of the other sites like this I've used don't allow that.

I haven't listened enough to decide whether it's doing a good job of finding my musical comfort zone, but I'm going to give it a few days. So far I like what I've heard. Pandora has given me (in addition to the two artists I've specified) a couple of Laura Cantrell songs and one by Ed Bruce. I know my musical taste is a tad oddball, but it also seems to like suggesting obscure artists (at least obscure to me). I've had one song by The Stationary Poets and one by Foxymorons. Though I vetoed both, I appreciated the chance to hear new artists. If it keeps that up, I may find some new folks that I like.

Anyway, just thought I'd pass these along in case anyone is interested.

Oh, I just discovered that after a few songs (10 or so I guess), Pandora makes you register for a free account to keep listening. The registration process wasn't too invasive though and as Caffeine Brother reminds me, you don't have to tell the truth during registration!