Today I had lunch with Loren Feldman from 1938Media at a good deli on the upper east side of Manhattan. Loren runs a video company called 1938 Media (no it’s not his year of birth!) which creates videos for companies along with his blog. Loren is very talented and understands the video industry inside and out. He was an actor in a past life and speaks direct. You might not always like (or agree with) what he says, but he speaks straight and many times is correct with his assessments.

One of the things he said is that video is about entertainment. I agree with this statement. While a blog such as this one is about content (with some entertainment value), video is about the entertainment value first, then the content. Loren is entertaining and if you haven’t checked out his videos, you should.

Here is a sample of his work. It’s from earlier this year where Loren from 1938Media speaks with Ted Murphy from Payperpost.

video removed due to podtech terminating loren’s contract.

Quick update via Download Squad and Google Groups: the Google Maps click-to-call feature has been discontinued.

From Maps Guide Mike, "this feature was a long-running experiment, and in the end it was decided to discontinue it."

Grant from Download Squad notes, "Goog411 is still available to US customers, and the post says that Maps is planning to add new features although, the "experiment" that was click-to-call has been ended.  Sad news, as this was an innovative piece of Google's heralded Maps service."

I, like Grant, liked this piece of technology. Perhaps the GrandCentral acquisition has something to do with it?

For those of us that are still living in the dark ages, using Internet radio instead of plugging into our iPods 24/7, I have found a very nice alternative to Launchcast. The site is called "Pandora", and they offer quite a bit more functionality and presentation than Launchcast does.

Within this blog entry, you will find a list of pros and cons for Pandora Radio as it compares to Yahoo!'s Internet Radio application.

First of all, let's take a look at the design of each application. Below you will find a screenshot of Pandora and then a screenshot of Launchcast.

If you would like to compare the two services yourself, or you would like to follow along with my review, here are the links to both services:
Pandora – http://www.pandora.com/
Launchcast – http://www.launchcast.com/

Now I will start a comparison between the two services based on the things you can see just from looking at the screenshots above:

Now I will get a little more in-depth in my analysis of the two services.

Ratings and Station Customization

Unfortunately in Pandora, at this time, you are only able to assign three different ratings to a song that plays. You can give it a "thumbs up", which means that you really like the song. You can give it a "thumbs down", which means you can't stand the song and you never want to hear it again. Finally, you can give it a "Zzz", which means that you like the song, but you've heard it too much recently. That is a nice feature, as that will keep the song on your station, but it will not play it again for 30 days.

Launchcast, however, allows much more in-depth rating and voting. With Launchcast, you can give the song anywhere from 1-4 stars or you can click on a symbol telling the player that you never want to hear that song again. In addition, you can rate the artist and you can rate the album using the same scale.

With Launchcast you also have much more control over choosing your music initially. You can rate artists, albums and individual songs. You can search through the entire library and begin preemptively rating things with very little effort.

In the category of being able to customize your station, Launchcast is still the winner.

Music Library

In this category, Launchcast seems to still be the winner, offering a great deal more new music than Pandora currently does. Launchcast picks up songs immediately from all sorts of different sources. One instance of this is the newest effort from Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi played the song live during an episode of American Idol this spring. The very next morning, that version played on my Launchcast player.

Another example is a group called "Anterior". They are a new metal band that Launchcast started playing about two or three weeks ago. Pandora, however, still has yet to even know they exist.

However, Pandora does get a leg up in my book. If you search for the band "Laughing Colors" on Pandora and Launchcast, both will return a single album. In the case of Pandora, the album is The Pattern Seed. In the case of Launchcast, the album is The Night Electric Died (an acoustic live performance by the band). The fundamental difference, though, is that you can only "purchase" Laughing Colors music from Launchcast, you can't actually add it to your station. Pandora allows you to add the album right in to your station so that you actually have a chance to hear it.

However, due to the volume of Launchcast's musical library, I am still going to have to give the edge to Launchcast.

Overall Performance

So far, after listening to Pandora on and off for a little over a day, I have yet to encounter an error in their player. Launchcast, however, serves up scripting errors all day long, and is usually down for hours at least once or twice a month.

In this category, I have to serve the trophy to Pandora.

Additional Features

Here are some additional features that are available through Pandora:

1. You can choose whether you want the player open in your main browser window, or if you want it open in a pop-up
2. You can open a context menu for each song that has played on your station. Within that context menu, you can choose to move the song to another station you control, start a new station based on that artist or song, view biographical information about the artist, song or album, you can purchase music from Amazon or iTunes and much more.
3. The explicit words filter seems to work much more effectively in Pandora than it does in Launchcast (although it's still not 100% effective). In addition, when you enable the explicit content filter, you can password-protect that feature, so your children cannot edit it.
4. From their FAQ, it appears as though Pandora does a much better job of separating holiday music from regular music. I can't tell you how many times I've heard Christmas music from some of my favorite artists on Launchcast, and I haven't yet figured out a way to tell Launchcast not to play holiday music at all.
5. Pandora can be embedded in your Web site, added to your blog and subscribed in your RSS Aggregator.
6. Pandora can be experienced without a Web browser. They offer their feature-rich application through select Sprint mobile phones, select mobile devices (the Sonos Digital Music System, the Logitech Squeezebox or the Logitech Transporter) and much more.

Overall, the appearance, presentation and performance of Pandora are so much better than Launchcast. Hopefully their features and music library will catch up to Launchcast and we can leave Yahoo! radio in the past very soon.

Curtiss Grymala is the full-time Webmaster for a community college in Virginia. In his spare time, he runs a freelance Web development company called Ten-321 Enterprises, is an active participant in the HTMLCenter Forums and offers small snippets of code and bug reports to the developers and modders of the YaBB Forum system. He has been developing Web sites and applications for nearly 15 years.

A month ago I posted about the "Best damn iTunes error message ever". Well today I found one that just might be even better. I am attempting to setup an interview with ikordo (CN coverage) CEO George Waidell. We used ikordo to select a time. After the system found an appropriate time, I received an email with an outlook attachment with the calendar details. I clicked it and when Outlook attempted to open the file, this is the error message that appeared:

Boy do I feel like an idiot. You know all of my life, I have always tried to think in the Gregorian format and never got anywhere. Now Microsoft has helped me to understand that viewing life using the Lunar option will make things right.

This might even be more exciting than the IE7 Dr. Watson Postmortem error. In my former life, we spent days working on error messages on large applications. Why is it that Microsoft has their developers create error messages? Perhaps if they used their marketing staff to create the error messages, then I would understand what in the hell they mean in the one above.

So as you work on your apps, don't leave error messages out. Think about what your customers will think when they see your error messages. Will they understand what they need to do? Good error messages can help reduce customer service and technical support time.

JamJunky, the online music review service we reported on first last month has launched a Facebook app. Looks like a great way to share your musical creations with your network using the hottest networking tool currently online.

The app includes the following for each of your songs:

• Title
• Genre
• Listen Count
• Comment Count
• Date Uploaded 

Editor's note: JamJunky founder James Thomas is an occasional writer on CN.

While checking out the local news this morning, I saw a spot on Fox News about a new dating startup called IAmFreeTonight. No, it's not a porn or escort service. It's a way to tell people you are free tonight for a date or meetup. They had a man who has used the service several times and a woman who was using it for the first time. The woman appeared to be their best looking applicant on the site from what I can tell.

The site appears similar to MeetMoi. MeetMoi brings people together using mobile and locator services for a more immediate hookup. IAmFreeTonight allows you to provide the days you are free to schedule a date/meetup.

The site appears quite overwhelming to me with everything as either a hover javascript or a popup. Not sure why the profiles need to be in a new window as it just complicates things. They do appear to have a lot of profiles and from what I can tell, college students are using the service heavily.

Check out my video review below and please post a comment if you are using this dating service.

Update: 7/23/2007 – appears RecipeZaar is now pointing to domain registrar landing page.

PaidContent is reporting that Scripps has acquired recipes portal Recipezaar. John Cook notes the price at ~$25 million. (update: I have received a company press release as well).

From the release, "We've been the dominant interactive player in the 'home' and 'food' categories for some time now. By focusing even more on the consumer and the online user experience – much in the way Recipezaar does – we believe we can broaden our reach and deepen our relationship with the consumer in these categories as well as other aspects of lifestyle,” said John Lansing, president of Scripps Networks. "This is a great first step toward our plan to rapidly expand our revenue base from interactive media.”

"We started Recipezaar as a couple of geeks in Seattle who love to cook, and more importantly, love to eat. Because we are technologists, our goal was to make it a lot easier to search for and to share recipes, taking the hassle out of cooking,” said Hakala. "It will be exciting to see how our technology platform can enhance the user experience not only for FoodNetwork.com, but for visitors to all of the online sites at Scripps Networks. Likewise, we know that the programming and content that will be available to Recipezaar users will be greatly enhanced.”

Started in 1999 as CookPoint, Recipezaar reported 2.3 million pageviews in June 2007.

Cooking and recipe sites have been hot since the beginning of the Internet. Next to the cat, they are still a hot content area. Allrecipes was acquired in 2006 for $66 million. It's interesting that in the Web 2.0/Social Media space, there are few recipe/food networks. Might be something to think about.