Resources: Niche Music Social Networks

You've heard of the big social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but some of the niche music social networks are starting to be very popular, too. Mashable has a post that describes what it claims are the twelve best music social network. Here is their list:

Flotones

Radio 2.0 from Mercora

MOG

Last.fm

iLike

JamNow

MusoCity

Haystack

Sonific

Midomi

iJigg

Sellaband

Last.fm with its 15 million users was recently bought by CBS. iLike's widget has become very popular on Facebook. MySpace and YouTube probably should probably be included on the list, because both are frequently turned to for music and music is one of the main reasons each became so popular.

New Media: Turn Your RSS Feeds into Podcasts

TalkR enables you to listen to your favorite text sources and blogs instead of reading them. Point it to an RSS feed and TalkR will convert the text to speech and provide you with a podcast to download at your leisure. Talkr can also keep tabs on your RSS feeds and send audio files to your device as they become available. The subscription options include both free and paid services. <http://www.talkr.com/>
<http://www.talkr.com/faq/what_is_talkr.html>

Search: FindSounds

You've got a surfeit of search engines to choose from if you're looking for articles on line. Photos and graphics, too, are easy enough to find with Google, Yahoo and NetVue image searches. But what if, amid the cacaphony of competing search engines, you're looking for a sound, a train whistle, say, a jackhammer like the one on the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City," or something more esoteric? FindSounds scours the web for AIFF, AU, and WAV files. From among its findings, you click on the nearby speaker icon to sample a returned suggestion, then choose the "Sounds Like" button to refine your search with a new list of noises that are related to the one you listened to. <http://www.findsounds.com/>