Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week
February 23rd, 2007 Davis Posted in Site Of The Week, Technology, Music, Web 2.0 |
Guitars Hosted on ZooomrAs a music fan, I always enjoy checking out new bands and learning more about the bands I already follow. For years, I’ve pretty much exclusively used All Music Guide for my music information needs, but last year I came across this week’s winner of the site of the week contest and have found it to be even more helpful then AMG.
Like AMG, MusicPortl is a site that tracks information about bands, but unlike AMG, they rely on the fans to help populate their data. By pulling in information from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr and music videos from YouTube, MusicPortl has become a one stop shop for learning about your favorite bands. One of the features I like best is their similar artists browse field that helps me to find new bands that may be of interest. MusicPortl also pulls in feeds from Technorati and LastFM to compliment the information they already have.
The overall site design is very clean and contains limited advertisements. Because the site relies on Javascript and Ajax for most of their content, it loads very quickly and creates a dynamic environment where the information is constantly changing.
MusicPortl also offers a Firefox and IE plugin that allows you to add their site to the search bar in your browser. This is especially helpful if you tend to look up a lot of bands on the fly.
While MusicPortl has come a long way considering it was launched less then a year ago, there are still a few more features I’d like to see added. Right now the site doesn’t scrape the web for lyrics to songs, which would be a great service to offer. It also doesn’t incorporate photos from sites like Zooomr or videos from sites other then YouTube. It would be great to see an even more diversied pool of resources for them to draw upon. As the site continues to develop, I’m sure that we will see more features added, but even without this support, MusicPortl is still a pretty slick site. Congratulations to MusicPortl on winning this week’s site of the week award.
The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. If you’d like to nominate you own site for the site of the week, feel free to send me an email at Davis (@) DavisFreeberg Dot Com and it will be considered for nomination.
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