You’ve probably heard of Pandora, the streaming music service. Maybe you already use their free browser-based service, which uses the Music Genome Project to find music you might like based on an artist or song you enter. I’ve found many new artists that interested me using Pandora over the past few years.

Due to copyright and licensing negotiations last year, Pandora was facing some pretty drastic increases in the fees they pay to the licensing organizations. The new fees would have been very stifling to internet radio, including Pandora’s service. Fortunately, the rates ultimately adopted weren’t as draconian, but it did mean that the free service had to limited to 40 hours a month per user. While many Pandora users stay under that limit, those who need more music can pay Pandora an annual fee of $36.00 for unlimited use of the service. This premium level of service, called Pandora One, also includes a higher quality of playback (192 Kbits per second), a handy desktop application (which eliminated my frequent mistake of closing my browser in the middle of song), no advertising and five continuous hours of music without having to touch a button on the app (the free version requires you to let the system know you’re still listening more frequently, since Pandora is paying by the song).

Since I have Pandora on pretty much all the time in my office (or on my iPhone when I’m out – yes, there’s an app for that), $36 is a bargain. If you haven’t used Pandora before, give the free service a try, and if you like it, consider supporting the service by upgrading to Pandora One.

A popular old post reprinted from my former “New Tech Heroes” blog, way back in 2008:

In late 2006, when the fuss over lonelygirl15′s real identity and the fact that her YouTube videos had been scripted was at its peak, I had a sense of deja vu. I remembered The Spot.

Wired ran a cover story on actress Jessica Rose and lonelygirl15 co-creators Mesh Flinders and Miles Beckett, and writer Joshua Davis breathlessly described the cloak-and-dagger behind the scenes action that made lonelygirl15, in Davis’ words, “a mashup of homemade video diary, soap opera, and mysterious, hint-laden narrative like Lost. It’s all the more engrossing because viewers can correspond with the characters and even affect the plot.”

Although YouTube didn’t exist in 1995 and broadband connections were rare outside of the workplace, Flinders’ “thrillingly uncharted creative landscape” had been tried before, and had produced the same reaction from the much smaller number of regular Internet users at that time. The Spot, or “Melrose-Place-On-The-Web,” as Wired called it in June 1996, was produced by American Cybercast and was the first website to feature episodic fiction in the style later used by Flinders with lonelygirl15. It also had banner ad sponsors, which made the site a pioneer in online advertising, and won one of the original Webby Awards.

Without video, the site made clever use of photo galleries and online diaries to create interest in the lives of the Spotmates, a group of attractive young men and women in their early twenties. The Spotmates were portrayed “on camera” by models from the Los Angeles area, and their “diaries,” which predated the term but were similar in tone to a personal blog, were written by creator Scott Zakaran and a team of writers. Fans (“Spotfans”) were encouraged to comment on the diaries and give advice to the Spotmates, sometimes affecting the plot line with their suggestions.

I’ve never been much of a soap opera fan. When I was in college, the peak of the Luke and Laura wedding hysteria meant General Hospital was “destination television” for many girls in my dorm, as well as a lot of the guys (though they probably won’t admit it now). But The Spot was fascinating to me, especially in the beginning when, like lonelygirl15, it wasn’t clear whether it was real or not. Keep in mind that there weren’t dozens of blogs coordinating to figure out the truth about The Spot in the way lonelygirl15 was finally outed in 2006, so individual web surfers were mostly left on their own to decide.

The conflicts between the Spotmates as they shifted alliances between each other, moved in and out of the house and dished the dirt on each other was enough to keep me coming back for more, but there was one “event” that happened at The Spot that was particularly memorable. While photos of the Spotmates on the beach had always been a big part of the appeal of the website, the legendary Spotmate Lingerie Party provided hours of clicking fun (especially on a dial-up connection). Sadly, I can find no leftover images from the site anymore other than the few archived on The Wayback Machine. They were tame compared to the terabytes of pr0n available on the web today, anyway, I suppose, which probably accounts for my nostalgia for The Spot and the Spotmates.

The Spot fizzled out in 1997 when American Cybercast went bankrupt, but at its peak it had over 100,000 hits a day, the equivalent of millions of hits today. The Spot was revived in 2004 for a couple years, but it wasn’t the same. It was truly one of the defining moments of the early Internet for me, and I still remember it fondly. Anyone else have Spotmate memories?