Richard Lennox

I have been meaning to write a little about my "Web Entertainment" set up for a while.  In fact since long before my issues with the computer, which set everything back and found me re-installing everything.  Well, not exactly everything, some of what I use for entertainment is completely web based and does not require any downloads.

There are maybe two streams of what I call Web Entertainment: Audio and Video.  I guess a third is my reading materials which is a collection of articles, blogs and other stuff that kind of fit into this category.

Audio resources are freely available across the web.  Not only are many radio channels streamed across the web but a service I particularly like and use frequently is available at Pandora.com.  This is a custom radio station generator.  Enter a song or artist and Pandora creates a radio station based on songs and artists that are similar in style and characteristics to your original selection.  You can also train Pandora to cut out those that do not quite match what you want, and best of all no ads and no annoying Disc Jockey's.  Podcasts are fun to listen to too, while I am not so keen on them through my Ipod,  I am more likely to listen through my desktop and iTunes still works great for that!

Video resources are available across the web – whether it be You Tube or Google Video or any others.  I tend to use the Democracy Internet video player that downloads videos automatically within channels.  Video Podcasts and general Internet videos are a growing field.  The democracy player list hundreds of channels that are series of videos.  It also allows me to add specific You Tube searches and feeds.  This enables me to get my favourite videos when I want them without having to find them.

For reading material I tend to subscribe to RSS feeds of the sites I visit most recently.  I am a Firefox (web browser) user and use the Sage extension for subscribing to feeds.  This is a lightweight RSS reader – there are many better ones out there, but I like that it plugs directly into Firefox, and I can choose to read it on the site or in the feed.