therobots.org - select * from robots

I very rarely write about tech things here; I don't know that anyone who regularly reads this would care that much. But I thought I'd point out a few things that I'm digging, and how they can be used. Once I get enough time to finish the upgrade to therobots, some of these will be used to provide some more information.

AudioScrobbler (and last.fm):
This system does what most social networking systems fails at - it allows you to use the system without doing any work at all. You drop a plugin into iTunes, XMMS, Winamp, or a bunch of other systems, and every so often it pings the AudioScrobbler server with what you've been listening to. Your listening behavior is tracked, providing you with charts, as well as recommendations and others that have similar tastes to you.

If you'd like, you can check out my profile. The system provides an RSS feed of the last tracks I listened to, which is nice in an exhibitionist way. Arbitrary groups can be formed, as well as listings by location. If the rest of you used this, too, we could form therobots group and see what the most popular artists are between us. Yes, I'm that much of a geek.

last.fm is a sister service; it provides streaming music based on the preferences in the AudioScrobbler system, and also tries out new tracks that you can mark as liked or disliked. It's very cool, but China's pipe is so slow streaming from the UK doesn't work well.

del.icio.us:
del.icio.us is an online bookmark manager. I used to think that the idea of putting bookmarks on a remote site was silly, and completely useless. But del.icio.us proved me wrong.

The idea is simple. When you find a site you want to remember, you click a button in your toolbar (a bookmarklet), enter a description if you want, and add tags to remember it by. After that it's available for anyone to see, and everyone's tags work together to build a wonderfully collaborative system. For example, you can look at every link tagged with Beijing, or view all of my music-related bookmarks. Any combination of tags, or a user's list, can be syndicated.

I plan to use this to create a side bar of links, so I can blab about neat things I find and I won't clutter up the main blog.

Other cool systems are Flickr and Technorati, but they're not quite as useful for me (at least not now).

Have you found anything useful out there?