Selling out: I’ve been using Pandora for over 2 years now and they seem to be selling out more and more recently. Used to be that they had a small 300×250 ad on their website, then they started interspersing ads with the music and now this. I understand their need to make money but they seem dead bent on making the site a giant billboard rather than experimenting with more novel ways to monetize their listeners.

Interestingly enough, I just visited Last.Fm as well and noticed the very same trend:

Music and personality: A fascinating study that looks at how you can judge a persons personality by his/her musical preference. According to this study, people were better judges of a person when listening to the type of music they liked than they were then they met the person briefly face-to-face. I wonder if this kind of information can be used by dating sites to better match personality types or look at someones changes in music preference over time and see how that maps to his/her personality changes. Last.fm provides an API to access this information so it is feasible to try it on yourself or people you have known for a while (who of course have been using Last.Fm for sometime). I imagine this data could get increasingly more interesting for research purposes as Last.Fm ages.

Website credibility: An old (dated 2001) but more relevant than ever study on what users perceive as being a credible website (the key components being trustworthiness & expertise). Recommend everyone working with websites of any kind to look at it if you haven’t already done so.

MapThatPad: Last but not least, a website that helps you with your apartment hunting process on Craigslist. This is pretty much what I wanted when I was searching for apartments a few months ago.