Squeeze Wilson and the Feeds

I've been doing a bit of tinkering behind the scenes.

First off, those of you who read my blogs via RSS feed, well, if I did everything correctly you shouldn't notice a thing. If you don't, there's a spiffy little link (the proper term seems to be "chicklet") on the side.

Also popping up on the side is a search box. This search box is different from the one up in the top left in that you can change the search parameters to include all the blogs I link to. It's still pretty clunky, but they're working on it.

Some may have noticed that my Pandora station list went away for a bit. It's back. The three most recent stations are the result of my experimenting. I was trying to see how the "music genome" triangulated artists, so I picked two acts of different eras to see what the genome would do.

First I created a pair of stations with nothing but one artist to create a pair of baselines. The "Jackie Wilson" station gave me Sam Cooke, The Temptations and The Isley Brothers - pretty much what I was expecting. The "Squeeze" station played Elvis Costello, Crowded House and XTC - again about where I was thinking it would go. So now the experiment: a third station with both Jackie Wilson and Squeeze as the "Artist Seeds."

Result: A Jackie Wilson song, followed by a Squeeze song, then The La's "There She Goes" and Yo La Tengo's "The Way Some People Die." At this point I thought the experiment was an interesting success, but then it played Elvis Costello followed by The Temptations, The Isley Brothers, XTC and Crowded House. Oh well.