Let’s find out what happened in 1973 – the year I was born in case you were wondering ;)

[Via The Denver Egotist]

“The pic itself is a 1.3 gigapixel, 75,000 pixel-wide image compiled from 36 photos that took one minute to capture. They used two Hasselblad H4D-50 cameras with 50 megapixel digital backs and, camera geeks, a 150mm lens on top and 100mm lens tilt shift adapter. Both cameras were mounted vertically on a tripod and rotated at 10 degree increments to take the pictures.”

8.195 people are tagged as we speak, has it been confirmed yet that’s a record?

This time it was a tweet from someone (can’t find it anymore) that notified me about a LIVE concert of dEUS (in Paradisio, Amsterdam) that caught my eye. And what can I say, I pretty much liked everything about that site. I liked how it had a nice countdown clock to the concert (custom for your time zone), I liked the live stream itself which was pretty good, I like the search functionality, the ability to watch older concerts and especially how you navigate through the tracks, the speed in which it gets connected to the streams, … fabulous! Seriously, how did I not notice this before?

Currently watching/listening to an old Zita Swoon concert, with Bettie Serveert and some Frank Black as well (for the Pixies stuff really).

Check out this clip below from his appearance at Jools Holland more than a year ago and then this little documentary (part 1/ part 2) to see what I’m talking about. Enjoy Steve with the Three String Trance Wonder and the Mississippi Drum Machine:

First thing I’m doing this weekend is buying his stuff, all of it! Authentic stuff, I tell ya.

Yesterday the Zune team released the 3rd generation of the Zune and I updated both my 1ste generation 30G Zune as well as the 2nd edition 8G Zune, which is the one I use most. And I got to say, seriously. I think the Zune software is worth installing even if you don’t have a Zune. The visualization is very nice, and especially (which is new in this release) how you can go into the MixView which shows similar artists (similar music or influenced by, …) and other Zune users that listened to this music. A nice mixture between recommendations from the music engine underneath as well as the social… hence the ‘Welcome to the social’ slogan for the Zune. Here’s what Wired had to say about MixView’s recommendation engine:

“Microsoft showed us a sneak preview of the Zune 3.0 software it plans to release on Sept. 16 with the latest generation of Zune devices, and what we saw made iTunes’ simple Genius feature look like a blast from digital music’s past. While iTunes serves up a text list of recommended songs within your library and from the iTunes store, adding to the more basic recommendations its MiniStore feature used to make, Zune reinvented the recommendation concept by collapsing artists, albums and fans into the same recommendation engine, more accurately mirroring the way people think about music.”

There’s just one thing missing though and that is  access to the Zune Marketplace. Since I live in Europe the only way for me to benefit from the all-you-can-eat monthly charge of $14.99 is to get a US credit card unfortunately. The new MixView makes me want that even more, since you obviously want to buy the music you’re discovering right away. So bring the Zune to Europe guys!

On October 9th he’s going to be live blipping from a bar in Munich. This means The Kaiser and the people he follows will be mixing it up that night in Munich and for all people (like me) that can’t be there that night, we can follow it live on Blip.fm (of course) but also on a live stream that is set up for this. Check it all out here – bring it on Kaiser!

PS: Just don’t let Marcus touch any of them drinks, that looks like a really bad idea.

PS 2: Blip.fm – are you listening? Maybe a good idea to show up, and blip some buzz around.

‘Cross The Breeze from Sonic Youth (Daydream Nation) is one of these pure rock songs that I like and that unfortunately not that many people know… and heck, because they don’t like it probably. No worries, the next posts will be again about advertising, marketing and the lot but I had to share this one with you. My yearly Sonic Youth post ;) Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: sonic youth, daydream nation, cross the breeze, crossthebreeze, music, blog

“Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We believe that you are in Belgium (your IP address appears to be xx.xxx.xxx.xx). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com“

That is really some bad news as I enjoyed Pandora very much. I actually met Tom Conrad – CTO of Pandora – very briefly in Vegas at MIX07 and I told him how many people enjoyed Pandora in Europe. That was 2 days before they shut it down so I feel like he should have told me about it then already.

Time to pick up on Last.fm again I guess, I tried to rememeber my account yesterday without much luck so I think I’ll have to set up a new one :( Good news is that Last.fm has just launched video as well, so it’s a good time to look into the service again anyway. For a moment I thought I would try Sonific.com as well since there’s a widget of Sonific for WordPress.com but it couldn’t find any of the first 3 artists I entered so I already gave up on that.

Yeah… I’m gonna miss Pandora.

As he was reading on this blog (thanks Pieter) he saw the post about ‘Daydream Nation’ that made him visit Pietel’s post on this. Surfing around there, he notices this post about a house for sale in Antwerp. Looks interesting but pricey, still Pieter decides to visit the house the same day. Looking around in the house, he notices the music albums and what do you know… ‘Daydream Nation’ is on top of the pile.

I love stories like this.