Fake Plastic Noodles

There have been a few things I’ve been playing around with online that I want to pass on…

The first is SonicLiving. I mentioned a few weeks back the ridiculous amount of shows that were coming up in the Detroit area. Most of the time I heard about them through word of mouth or by the sheer fact that I went to the band’s site to look up tour dates because they had just released an album. SonicLiving changes that.

The site features a calender interface where you can import your iTunes library and your Last.fm and/or Pandora profiles so that they get a sense for the type of music that you like. Based on that music, SonicLiving alerts you when one of your artists is coming to your town

Why I like it: You can sign up for as many cities as you like (so if you’re moving soon or going on vacation, you’ll be able to see who’s where when). I’ve already been notified of a few bands I didn’t know were touring. You can also find tickets and set up show reminder alerts. Rock on.

Second we have Social|Median. I received this invite through a special offer on PitchEngine

Social|Median is a news service crossed with a social network. The main feature of the site are the daily news updates based on the news networks you choose to be a part of, whether they be as broad as ’sports’ or as narrow as ‘iPhone’ (ok, maybe that one isn’t so narrow) . If you don’t see a news network you’d like to get updates on, you can create one and submit stories to it through the site or a toolbar application. More social network goodness includes the ability to share and comment on these stories, which they call ’snips.’ How 2.0 of them….

Why I like it: It’s nice to be able to expand outside of my RSS feeds for news. I’ve been able to discover new sites to subscribe to as well as stories that somehow missed their way into my Bloglines.

What really impressed me, though, was an e-mail I received from Jason Goldberg, one of the founders of the site. Within one week of me signing up, Jason e-mailed me to ask how things were going. It was a basic e-mail, asking for site feedback, nothing schmancy, but the fact that it even happened made me feel appreciated. My feedback was that I would like to be able to click through directly to the story from my daily e-mail instead having to go through the Social|Median site.

Social|Median is currently in alpha with just over 3,000 users, but if anyone is interested I have a couple invites to give out - Just leave a comment. For more info, check out their FAQ.