I've stumbled across some pretty cool websites tonight, worth sharing:

Pandora
"Pandora has hired 30 musicians who have spent years analyzing 400 attributes of songs, like melody, rhythm and vocals. They’ve analyzed over 10,000 artists and 300,000 songs to date. Users pick a band or song to get started, and create a “channel” based on that type of music and which you can stream over their site in high quality audio. Over time, by telling Pandora whether or not you like a given song, the channel will evolve. You can share these channels with other Pandora users." -- from TechCrunch

What's especially neat about Pandora, and what makes it better than Yahoo's similarly free launchcast radio web-based application is that it plays artists that match your taste but that you likely haven't heard before; whereas Yahoo sticks with mainstream picks (or repeatedly plays the exact songs you've starred instead of searching to play songs similar to what you've indicated you like).

Equally cool (and what Pandora's technology works with) is the Music Genome Project

PaidContent.org
"Paidcontent.org is a news site covering the business of digital media and content."
I like sites like this that quickly update me on the "cool" new movements in internet content and capability. The site has effective links to find more information when you want it (a feature Slate and Wikipedia employ extensively; I really, really like this feature and its ability to lead you down a winding internet path otherwise unlikely to be created -- it allows me to feed my occassional ADD tendencies and follow the littlest things that capture my intrigue).

Side note: Twiki (a cousin of Wikipedia, I think, or the same development company) has been implemented with many success stories by big companies to facilitate communications and knowledge retention on big projects. I first heard of it through a random discussion board on my company's intranet (we don't use it, but there are whispers of future use). I think the underlying technology, and the day-to-day capabilities it provides to streamline information management are really cool.

A9.com
This is Amazon's new-ish (I have no idea when it came out, really) search engine to rival Google. As much as I like the ability to search different forums, the results become very cluttered and distracting. If the display format were changed a bit, I could see slowly switching away from being a die-hard Google-er.

The Great Google Wipeout
Fittingly, a story in Slate first started my stumbling link-to-link-to-link discovery tonight. It took me a paragraph or two to "get it" (I won't ruin the reading experience for you by giving a synopsis).

I don't understand Google Base -- what's the point? What makes it different and better (a trademark of Google technology, typically)? Upon first perusal, it seems like a less developed and more difficult to use amalgamation of ebay, google, and froogle.

Share cool sites you particularly enjoy (or that just made you go, "wow. who thought of that?!") and let's nerd it up all together.