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Pandora

So my brother stumbled onto this really cool internet radio station yesterday. It’s called Pandora Internet Radio and can be found here: www.pandora.com

Now what’s so different about this internet radio station compared to the millions out there? Collaborative Filtering.

Basically Pandora asks you to name a song or an artist, and it will search it’s database to find it for you. It will then play for you songs that resemble your search or songs that it thinks you will like. For each song played, it will let you rate it with a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’ and from there it will fine tune your profile. The more songs and ratings you give it, the more accurate the profile it will have of you.

Basically it works off of the Collaborative Filtering algorithm. It will try to match your tastes with the tastes of other users. If I happen to like the bands Mogwai, Metric, and Tool and you happen to like Mogwai and Metric, Collaborative Filtering will recommend you some Tool songs.

Pandora also uses metadata to categorize each song. So if you like Mogwai, then it will provide songs that are from the rock genre, with little vocals, and lots of soloing (choosing from many other variables as well).

Coincidentally I learned all of this stuff in one of my Comp Sci classes this semester, so it’s pretty interesting stuff for me. Pandora is a very cool piece of web technology. Check it out!

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Google Web Toolkit

Yes, another technology post. I read on Slashdot today that Google released another version of its Google Web Toolkit.

Web Toolkit? Well, it’s a spiffy framework that will transform your Java applications into web applications. You heard me. Write a Java application and then run the toolkit and it’ll compile your code into a webapplication using AJAX and Javascript.

Personally, I think this will revolutionize the way we design web-pages. Especially considering that it’s a very fresh and new project, one can only hope that it will become more versatile as newer features are added with each release.

As much fun as it is designing a webpage, it never has the elegance and ease of expression as writing an application. Why bother writing a bazillion select statements and fidgeting with html form buttons when you can pump out a few lines of Java code.

I haven’t played around with the toolkit yet (damn you exams for eating up all my time!), but I definitely will give it a try in the near future. There are a bunch of example sites made with it on the page. I was really impressed with what it could do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 10:19 pm and is filed under G33k. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.