ReadWriteWeb

Nothing beats a good recommendation for a new band to listen to, but a recommendation for a new music blog to read can be a gift that keeps on giving. Extension.fm, a New York startup that provides a browser plug-in that captures all the MP3 files you come across and turns them into a playlist, has just announced the creation of a new experimental Labs department.

First entry into Extension's Labs is something the company calls The Super Awesome Music Blog Finder Thingy ™. Enter your Last.fm username and it will recommend new music blogs that have posted music from artists you've listened to the most over the last 30 days. It's not great, yet, but it could make a pretty great feature once more fully baked.

A new study of online discussion around social music sites shows Apple's Ping is the least-talked about among Spotify, Rdio, Blip.fm and Pandora. Of the relatively little being said about Ping, 43% is negative, 3% is mixed and 54% is positive, according to the study by Infegy, which analyzes "chatter" from millions of sites on the Web.

Infegy looked at a 10,000 post sample from the past 30 days to determine how the top music sites stacked up against each other.

It was just about a year and a half ago now that we were hearing the bells toll for Internet radio service Pandora, but, as evidenced in today's New York Times profile of the decade old stalwart, the service seems to be going nowhere but up.

While Pandora "has been on the verge of death, struggling to find investors and battling record labels over royalties," according to the Times' profile, a recent move by Warner Music may help to put one Internet radio station above the rest.

Dan Kantor, the man behind de.licio.us's Playtagger and Firefox extension, has brought us a new toy to play with that literally makes the web your musical oyster. ExtensionFM is a Chrome extension that automatically scrubs the websites you visit, finds embedded music, and adds it to a library of online music.

As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

A settlement for nearly 2,000 years, London is today the most populous greater metropolitan area in Europe with over 13 million residents. Home to popular tourist locations such as Big Ben, The London Eye and Buckingham Palace, London's skyline is unmistakable. While London often serves as the representative bridge from Europe to the United States, it also is the seat of Europe's rapidly expanding entrepreneurial landscape.

The London startup scene saw its first major consumer Internet success in 1998 with LastMinute, a travel site similar to Expdedia that eventually traded publicly on the London Stock Exchange beginning in 2000. UK companies like LastMinute were largely able to avoid the doom and gloom of the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century due to the nature of the venture funding scene.