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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 26, 2008 2:17 AM. The previous post in this blog was Travel quiz solution. The next post in this blog is There but for the grace of God go I. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

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Saturday, July 26, 2008

Warning: Radio Bojack has been hijacked

For more than a year now, we've had our own internet radio station of sorts going, courtesy of an outfit, based in London, known as Last.fm. This service keeps track of all the music we listen to on our various computers, and plays most of it back at random on our own personal radio station whenever we ask it to.

That is, it did.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of days, something terrible has happened at Last.fm, and when you call up our radio station at the moment, you get screaming garbage that we would never listen to. Yesterday most of it was in a foreign language. Tonight it's in English, but it's horrible.

We should have known that the acquisition of Last.fm by CBS a few months ago was the beginning of trouble. Already they appear to have screwed up a pretty good thing.

We'll monitor the situation and let you know when things are restored to normal. Until then, you may wish to approach Radio Bojack with extreme caution.

UPDATE, 4:00 a.m.: Things have cleared up for the moment, but we are advised that the problem comes and goes. For now, our disclaimer remains in effect.

UPDATE, 7/29, 4:54 p.m.: We're cautiously pronouncing the problem fixed.

Comments (2)

Yep, I used to be a fervent Last.fm fan, and turned my nose up at Pandora.

Then I occasionally deigned to use PandoraFM (the mashup service) just so I could still send songs to Last.fm for the recommendation service.

But Pandora came from behind to pull out the killer app for the iPhone. Now? I have several streaming radio stations for free, courtesy of my iPod-compatible car stereo.

The Last.fm app for the iPhone? Stuttery, slow and/or plain just doesn't work half the time...

You ever try Muxtape?
http://muxtape.com/

It's not really the same as last.fm--you upload your own songs to make a "digital mixtape" you can share with people--but I like it a lot.




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