What is scrobbling, you ask? Here’s your answer.

Now this probably seems like exactly the kind of privacy invasion that would make me totally paranoid, and you’re right. I’ve known about Last.fm for years, but I’ve avoided it like the plague, mainly because I was afraid it was either a trick by the RIAA to collect data on music pirates (which I shouldn’t really worry about, because 99% of my music is legit, and I don’t use P2P networks) or it was spyware.

Well, OK, it is spyware in a sense, I suppose, but I realize now that it’s a bit different if you know you’re being spied on, and you have total control over what the spy can see.

Mainly, I have wanted for ages to have a way to automatically display on my website what music I’ve been listening to, and with Last.fm’s scrobbling, and an RSS feed, it is now possible. So you will note that in the right column on all of my pages, in addition to my Twitter feed, I now also have “What I’m Listening To.” Dangling participles aside, it’s exactly what I had been hoping for.

I also have all of my recent (original) music up on Last.fm, including free downloads. Check it out!

And finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge Last.fm for WordPress, the excellent WordPress plugin I’m using for the feat of syndication you see on these pages. I futzed for an hour or so last night with various RSS feed plugins for WordPress, was disappointed with them all, and then I decided to just check and see if someone had written a plugin for this specific purpose. This plugin is fantastic — it does exactly what I wanted, and is a complete no-brainer to set up. Nice!