PSSST, THEY'RE INSIDE YOUR HEAD

As if a whole Musicology Issue a couple of weeks ago wasn't enough, we're getting those distinctive and rather unappetizing been-withholding-information self-directed guilt trip jitters. Because London-based Last.fm is so good it automatically guilts you into spreading the word about it to everyone you know.

Sure, it may at first seem a bit too Pandora-like. And it kinda is. (Except it's a lot less xenophobic -- as of three weeks ago, Pandora is no longer available outside the US. More on the reasons here.) But Last.fm also very different -- dubbed "the social music revolution," it's the love-child that resulted from a three-way between MySpace, Pandora and a psychic.

On Last.fm, not only can you discover new music based on what you already dig (either through similar artists or tags), but you can also meet people who share your musicosophy, discover upcoming gigs fine-tuned to your likes, brag with your impeccable taste in music by embedding various widgets in your various online addictions (such as the latest Facebook app and the neat, albeit legal-disclaimer-plagued, Skype radio plugin), and get recommendations based on your music profile. Best of all, you can do it all on your very own desktop by downloading the super-nifty Last. fm player. It can do pretty much anything, including "scrobbling" your iTunes library to better dissect your taste. Artists and labels can also upload their stuff to promote it on Last.fm, hoping to one day end up on the top charts. Which also help us regular folks get a feel for what's striking a chord with the rest of the world. And what's a 2.0 venture without its very own blog? Get the scoop on Last.fm from the guys and gals behind it.

As if to confirm our faith in Last.fm's merit, a total stroke of timing coincidence revealed that it's not just us little people drinking the Last.fm Koolaid. Between the time we started writing this and, errr, press time, CBS radio, already the largest owner of radio stations in the US, coughed up $280 million and joined the recent media acquisition fever, snatching the London-based venture. This major step-up from commercial to dot-commercial radio earned CBS 15 million Last.fm users and a seat on the 2.0/social-networking/consumer-in-control express. As for us, we've long earned our $18.60 cost-per-user CBS paid in the deal and we strongly recommend you do the same.

Oh and did we mention they've got a gigantic slew of free stuff? Like this amazing track by Swedish duo Club 8.

Club 8 - We're Simple Minds

UNTRIVIA

It's new media snack time for the data-hungry. Dig into a few quick bites.

* Second Life gets 30,000 daily visitors, a total of 6.5 million registered.

* About 7,200 new blogs are created every hour.

* 10 million people were listening to podcasts in 2006; by 2010, it's expected to be 50.

* About 100 million videos are viewed every day on YouTube; about 65,000 videos uploaded every day.

* By the end of 2005, just over 1 billion people were online -- that's 1/6th of the world.

IT'S ALIVE, IT'S ALIVE

A new kind of company is giving us a reason to do the impossible: take the Google needle out of our veins. Mahalo Inc. (Hawaiian for "thank you" and, coincidentally, Bulgarian for "pendulum") is a human-powered search engine.

What this means is that rather than delivered by thousands of algorithm-spitting computers, your search results are hand-curated by...gasp...flesh-and-blood humans. The idea is that human thought is a much better filter for information people care about than a machine ever could be. And "care about" is the operative phrase here -- while Mahalo can't compete with the billions of keywords Google indexes every day, its "curators" have assembled 4,000 search terms they think people find most search-worthy, aiming to reach 10,000 by year's end.

While Mahalo's concept may seem like a step down from the 2.0 pedestal, it may one-up the mechanical giants in one very important way: quality. In a classic search engine query, you're likely to end up knee-deep in "results pollution" as more and more commercial websites figure out ways to crack the algorithms and boost their rankings. Not so easy to do when there's a human on the other end of the line, which makes Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis (who also founded Weblogs Inc.) boast the conviction that Mahalo's results are "going to be five to 10 times better because humans have thought about them."

Seems like the concept is striking a chord with the media mogul set -- so far, Mahalo's investors include all-around entrepreneur Mark Cuban and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. But don't take their word for it -- check it out for yourself or read some more.

BURSTING THE CARBON MONOXIDE BUBBLE

Gracing the streets of China is this campaign for the World Wildlife Fund by Ogilvy / Beijing.

The issue: China is growing so rapidly its skies are choking with the gas emissions from the millions of cars. To help relieve this budding environmental crisis, WWF launched a 20 Tips For Sustainable Development campaign.

The black cloud on this car drives traffic to the campaign website, 20to20.org, and embodies one of the 20 tips: as the copy reads, "Drive one day less and look how much carbon monoxide you'll keep out of the air we breathe."

Creative Director: Doug Schiff; Art Directors: Kama Yu, Teng Tong Hoe; Copywriters: Doug Schiff, Fei Zhao

CAUTION: COULD LEAD TO DEPENDENCY

And speaking of the world, how about this new wonder by California-based web wiz Dave Troy? After his super-popular TwitterVision a while back, which maps Twitter postings by people all over the world in real time, he's come up with the even-more-elegant FlickrVision, which does the same with Flickr photos -- it displays a world map on which photos pop up for a few seconds as they're being uploaded by users all over the world. A brief caption tells you what/who the picture is of and where in the world it's being uploaded from. If you dig it, you can click on it until it enlarges and they click on the person's username to go to their Flickr album.

Try it and you'll see how addictive it is -- in just the few seconds we spent taking these screen grabs, we saw snapshots of a gory bar fight in the UK, a traditional Japanese theater performance, and a toddler playing with star fruit in Indonesia.

Powered, of course, by Google, which means you can zoom in as far as, say, a specific block in your city and -- okay, this may be crossing the webcreep line -- figure out the exact address of, say, the dude who just uploaded a picture of himself mooning San Francisco traffic.

You can also try it in 3D.