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eMusic.com, the subscription-based music download service, has began what seems to be a gradual redesign of their website. I wanted to bring attention to this because I’ve been a subscriber for a while and can now say that a lot of my most listened to albums have come from eMusic. I’ve never liked the site’s design much, so it’s great to see that they are working on making their service even better in this way.

The best example of the redesign is currently the album info page—it’s way nicer to look at and better organized. You can collapse and expand the various sections of the page, which include a brand new one that pulls relevant YouTube videos and the artist’s Wikipedia page. The user reviews are also given more prominence.

Because of its DRM-free service, eMusic has gravitated towards representing independent labels and artists, a turn of events that it has embraced and capitalized on. The major labels do not want a DRM-free contract, and it’s for this same reason that I keep renewing my subscription—it’s a great place to find indie music I might enjoy.

12/21/08 Update: Since I wrote this post, both Mixwit and Muxtape have shut down.

Have you noticed that there are all kinds of websites nowadays letting you create your own music playlists in the form of mixtapes and publish them pretty much anywhere? It’s one of the nice by-products of social networking. Mixwit is one of them, and it comes complete with analog tape cassette skins! It brings back memories of large chunks of my childhood spent sitting in front of the stereo creating mixtape after mixtape after mixtape. I just couldn’t resist it. Muxtape is another such cool service, but it doesn’t let you embed your mixtape on your website as of yet.

For an amazing showcase of analog audio cassette designs check out tapedeck.org.

This is a hilarious customized 404 error page I just found. I came across it from cartoonist Tony Millionaire’s website, which I visited after seeing this. Quite the piece of art. In fact, Pressure Printing seems to have a good number of collectible art treasures currently in stock. I have got my eye on the Tony Millionaire and Glenn Barr pieces.

Very interesting is the Process section, which outlines how the prints are made. Truly amazing.

It was brought to my attention yesterday that Google has added an alternative, more enhanced flavor to its classic look: Personalized Google is here.

If your primary email is Gmail, like mine, and you are signed in to your account, Google.com defaults to Google.com/ig. There, you can add, edit, or remove information panes, and even rearrange them any way you want by dragging them around the page. Currently, I have set up my start page to include movie showtimes and ratings, Gmail preview, bookmarks, technology news, word of the day, and the local weather.

If I wasn’t a Gmail user, I probably wouldn’t care for this. Besides, I now use Blingo for web searching (except when searching for images, because Google gives me more options). But I like the simplicity of it, and it works well as a browser homepage. I say, there’s never too many ways to keep yourself updated on things.

When I first found out about Backpack a few months ago, I was very excited about it, because one of the neat things I can do with it is to place notes in my pages together with links to interesting sites/pages I would wanna go back to, and I could access them wherever I am. That is, in fact what I use it for most of the time. But, I realized just recently that the del.icio.us way of saving ‘bookmarks’ is much more efficient than the Backpack way. Continue reading »