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Filed under: Audio, Internet

Last.fm postpones international fees

by Brad Linder Mar 30th 2009

Last.fm
Internet radio service Last.fm is holding off on a plan to begin charging customers outside of the US, UK, and Germany a monthly fee to access streaming music. The move has received a fair amount of criticism, primarily from users who don't want to shell out 3 Euros a month to pay for the service.

In a blog post today, the company explains that it hasn't been able to make enough money from advertising in each country where the service is offered to support the service. Last.fm is holding off on charging subscription fees until it makes a few changes including the ability for users to purchase gift subscriptions for friends and pay for transactions using services other than Paypal.

[via Mashable]

Tags: advertising, internet-radio, last.fm, subscriptions

Filed under: Blogging, Productivity

Strategies to clean up your rss feed subscriptions - Readers Sound Off

by Jason Clarke Feb 26th 2007

OverwhelmUgh. I'm buried under unread RSS feeds. Right now if I look down at Google Reader Notifier (a Firefox Add-In), I see that I've got 1927 unread items in my subscriptions.

I thought I was being responsible; I've got my feeds split up into logical categories, including one called "Now", which is the stuff I told myself I would always stay current on. Google Reader won't tell me exactly how many unread items are in that folder, but it's more than 100... that's for sure.

While there's nothing you can do about it if life simply gets too busy to stay current, there should be a way to pare down what you're reading to a manageable level. In fact, Google Reader's Trends page will show you what you are (and aren't) paying attention to, who hasn't posted in forever, and which feeds simply bury you under too much content. One click on the garbage can for any of the feeds in here will unsubscribe you.

That helps.

But it's not enough.

I still need help determining what is and isn't important to be following. I'm currently subscribed to almost 300 feeds, and that's after some heavy pruning. I need to be down around 100, but it depends on the feeds themselves; if they're relatively low traffic, I can carry many more.

So - Download Squad readers, Sound Off! Tell us how you mercilessly keep your feed subscriptions lean and mean. Hit up the comments!

Tags: information overload, InformationOverload, overwhelm, RSS, RSS Feeds, RssFeeds, subscriptions, techniques, tips, tricks

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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Web services, Google

Google Reader gets UI face lift, settings page

WindowsMacLinuxby David Chartier Jun 28th 2006


Google Reader has received a major UI overhaul and joined its sibling Google apps with the introduction of a full-blown "Settings" page. Users finally have a powerful management panel for their Subscriptions and Labels, allowing batch operations for deleting, renaming and shuffling subscriptions around. The Google Reader team even went so far as to allow you to toggle whether animations play when you're using gReader.


The face lift doesn't stop at Google Reader's settings and preferences though. There is a new Labels menu to accompany Subscriptions, and both are ripe with AJAX-y pull-down goodness. Gone is that clunky Subscriptions section that folds out; now they're both handy menus that allow you to chose single feeds or entire labels. But if you aren't a menu and mousing kind of reader, the translucent label selector you can access from a keyboard shortcut (g + l) is still present.

All in all this is a spectacular (and necessary) update to my personal favorite of the online newsreader offerings. Call me crazy, but I think this finally makes Google Reader feel like it has the necessary features to stack up to the competition - even though it's still in the Labs.

Tags: google, greader, labels, reader, rss, settings, subscriptions, UI, update, upgrade

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