"i think this might be my proudest professional achievement to date. please please please keep drawing more smoking bears."

"Fresh data straight out of our uber warehouse: As the news breaks, scrobbles soar as people go to pay tribute to one of the greatest pop artists of all times." I really didn't want to talk about this story at all - but at least there's some interesting data about it. So have some data.

"Even the platform holders are excited about the potential for social networking to tie into games. At E3, Microsoft proudly announced integration of Facebook, music network Last.fm and Twitter with Xbox Live. The latter pair are fairly irrelevant, admittedly. Last.fm is solely a music service, while Twitter isn't actually a social network at all - it's a one-to-many broadcast system, which isn't quite the same thing." Oh. But that's where you're wrong, Rob. Sorry.

"Jones said how most open city games tend to come with about 100 licensed tracks, but that they realised that most players would far rather listen to their own mp3 collection. But this is an online game. So they’ve done a deal with Last.FM to use their technology in such a brilliantly imaginative way. If you’re listening to a favourite track in your car, and drive past some other players, should they have the same track on their hard drive the game will find it, and they’ll hear it from your car as you go by. Should they not have it, the game will find a track that’s similar and play that instead." Just that quotation alone is remarkable, but it really does sound like APB is something special; let's just hope it's a success.

"Playdar is a music content resolver service - run it on every computer you use, and you'll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching though all your computers, hard disks, online services, and friends' music collections." Feels a lot like Audioscrobbler did when that first launched; it'll be interesting to see what user-friendly services get wrapped around it.

"it doesn’t sound particularly astounding on paper, but within a day it recommended to me a couple of albums i that was very excited about but had no idea they were forthcoming." Excellent stuff.

"it's official, this is the best thing on the internet, ever." Let's Play Ukelele skims your last.fm tags, works out which songs or bands you like are the easiest to play, and gives you the tab and the chords. Delightful.

"The spreadsheet has an older, wiser cousin, and it is called database."

I get the feeling last.fm will be just fine; what CBS have _really_ acquired is AudioScrobbler. That data's worth a fortune.

"Scrobbler is a [ruby library] wrapper for the audioscrobbler (last.fm) web services." It looks very ncie.