If you’re a music junkie (like I’m striving to be), chances are you’re the type who wants to share his music collection with the world. Just let everybody around the world hear how awesome your taste in music is, right? However, the cost of sharing the music with the world as a live DJ can be a pain in the ass, with a decent shoutcast server costing up to $30 a month, and licensing an extra $10 or so.

If you’re like me, you’ve got to take what you can for free, none of this monthly charge shit (because our dads got sick of us using their paypal without their consent and cancelled their credit cards, right?). So, what is an aspiring DJ such as yourself going to do? You’ve got nowhere to go. No server, no license no luck.

Well, lucky for you, I have a few resources that will allow you to broadcast your own web-radio-show thing for absolutely no cost to you.

BUT FIRST, you’ll want to acquaint and equip yourself with some way to broadcast a shoutcast stream. For free, all I can suggest is using Winamp with the Shoutcast DSP plugin. (If you’re on Mac or Linux, you’re on your own unless you go through the trouble of using an emulator).

As for learning how to use that…well, thats for a later time (unless you get off your lazy bum and do some google searches yourself).

So here are the resources I was talking about:

1. Freecast - A UK based shoutcast which allows DJ’s to sign up and book their own 1hour increment slots. It’s great for people who wish to broadcast to their friends (and fans) on their free time. The only limiting factor is that you only get 4 credits per week for booking 1 hour slots.
2. 1Radio.org - A similar concept to above, but it essentially has a larger fanbase and more features. It also has a credit awards feature, where you can EARN credits by things such has hosting a popular broadcast, broadcasting at unpopular times, and referring your friends.

So, if you’d like to dabble in the magical world of sharing music live and having your own little fanbase, try starting out with those.

(If you’re more interested in listening to streams, I recommend VLC since that shit plays anything)

In the never-ending race to be anything better than MySpace, AOL, or Disney, businesses are always looking to innovate their services, and hopefully crap out produce something that seems so fantastical it draws in customers like a hot Russian prostitute giving out free trials. Anyway, as many of us know, one of facebook’s most popular latest innovation is easily the facebook chatbar, which is simply a small bar at the bottom of the page that shows us online friends and new notifications. However, this innovation was so powerful that it defeated Chuck Norris and was crowned the new place to be for instant messaging, marking MSN, AIM, and Yahoo! messangers obsolete in the eyes of many.

However, I get the feeling we’re going to be seeing this concept used on many forums and other social networks within the next one to two years. To state an obvious example, MySpace was quick to ripoff the idea and use it on their own site. However, the chatbar has appeared in a place I’d thought I’d never see it: Youtube.

The Offender in Question

Don’t believe me? Login to Youtube and look for yourself.

Anyway, with companies like Social Engine already creating chatbar plugins for their own products and CometChat introducing such a functionality to Vbulletin, it’s only a matter of time that the concept is practically a prerequisite for any type of community website. Then it’ll be only a matter of time that the concept is worn out and nobody gives a shit any longer.

So what can you do about it? Absolutely nothing. Even if you and everybody else in the world boycotts any new sites that decide to be as innovative, there’s always going to be the idea that their site NEEDS it. Anyway, I’m going to jump far into the future, and when I come out with a forum, it’s going to have an instant messenger styled web-based chat. So it will be like having your own MSN in your browser.

And now I’ve lost any lust to write…