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The Pandora music streaming service is a great way to quickly tap into some internet radio stations, but it’s also a powerful tool for finding new music you might be interested in. With a little extra care and feeding, Pandora can offer up some new listening opportunities catering right to your musical tastes.

For those listeners looking for methods of adding some diversity to your regular stations, check out our tips for finding some new tunes. For even a small time investment you can spice up your stations and find more artists and tracks you might not already have known about.

1. Add Variety to Your Stations

Ever start to feel the station you’ve created is getting stale? If you’ve listened to it a lot, you can start to hear many of the same songs repeated again and again.

But the good news is you can break out of that loop by adding variety to your stations. Simply click the “add variety…” button in the lower left below a station’s name to add variety to that station.

You can add either an artist or a song to your station, which effectively infuses it with a whole new set of tracks.

2. Find a Shared Station

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to whip up a new Pandora station. The stations that other users have created are available to you for listening as well, giving you a quick way to hop in and find some new tunes.

To find a shared station, choose “Find a Shared Station” from the “Share” dropdown menu. From here you can search on a genre, style, mood or artist to find matching stations created and curated by other Pandora listeners.

To share your own stations and make them available in search results to other users, all you really need to do is add a description to your station. Click the Options menu on the lower right beneath your station name and choose “Edit Station Details.” From here you can edit all the details for your station including name, description, artist and song seeds, and even your thumbed-up or down song list as well.

3. Find Other Fans

Another good way to find new stations and artists to check out is by finding other listeners who are fans of music you like. To do this, click the “Share” dropdown menu again and choose “Find Other Listeners.” You’ll be taken to a search interface that specifically looks for results in listener profiles. Here you can input artists or songs you like and get back a list of other Pandora members who have either listed that band or track in their profile or who have a station containing that artist or track.

From each user’s profile, you can listen to the stations they’ve been creating and listening to, see what they’ve bookmarked, and any personal details they’ve provided in their bio and contact information. Depending on how musically compatible you are, you might want to bookmark some of those listeners for later so you can find them again and listen to their stations or check out their bookmarks.

4. Use Your Bookmarks

Speaking of bookmarks, they can be used as a powerful tool to store and retrieve ideas for later listening. You can bookmark artists, songs and other listeners, and each profile page gives you various options to start up some new related music.

From an artist’s page you can create a new station or listen to a station someone else already created, see which other users are listening to this artist, read their bio (with links to influencing and otherwise related artists), get a list of similar artists linked to their landing pages, and see who is commenting on that artist.

From a song’s page you can play a short clip, see who else has been listening to this song, see a list of similar songs, get a list of the Music Genome Project attributes associated with this song, and who is commenting on the track.

5. Use RSS Feeds

If you’ve found some other Pandora listeners whose tastes you admire, or have friends who use the service whose tastes appeal to you, you can use Pandora’s RSS feeds features to get updates on those listeners’ activities right in your feed reader of choice. You can get a feed of their bookmarked songs and artists, their created stations, the stations they listen to, and/or all their recent activity.

Each feed can be customized to set a maximum number of items. Bookmarked song and artist feeds can also be customized with a time period: today, this week, this month or this year.

You can also access the feed subscriptions right from an individual user’s page as well; you don’t have to have their email address as required on the feeds page.

6. Use Google

Pandora has its own search tool dubbed “Backstage” that is a great window into the service (and powers several of the suggestions above). But power users and search geeks might want to go the extra mile and do some new music hunting via Google as well.

Search for Albums — combine the query “site:pandora.com inurl:album” with an artist’s name to turn up the complete catalogue for that artist on Pandora. You can play short clips of the tracks from the albums as well as add them as seeds to your own stations, find out who else is listening to them and commenting on them, and so on.

Search for Artists — the base query “site:pandora.com inurl:artist” will simply turn up all artists currently tracked by Pandora. Combine with other search phrases to find all artists with that search phrase somewhere in their profile.

Search for Songs — the base query “site:pandora.com inurl:song” combined with a search phrase will turn up matching songs with that phrase somewhere in the song’s profile.

Search for Listeners — use the query “site:pandora.com inurl:people” plus a search phrase of your choice to find fans with that phrase somewhere in their profile. From there, as discussed above you can traverse their listening universe and get new ideas for music you might want to check out.

Search for Specific Attributes — this is one of our favorite Pandora power tips. You can use the base query “site:pandora.com inurl:song” combined with any of the Music Genome Project attributes to turn up matching tracks that fit one or more specific qualities. In the example image above we’ve called up a list of tracks that have been identified with “breathy female vocals” and “off beat style.” If you have an idea of the common themes and attributes in some of the music you like listening to, this tip can be a powerful way to get at some new and unexpected musical matches.

Have other ways to get more new music flowing from Pandora? Let us know in the comments!

More music resources from Mashable:

- 10 Ways to Share Music on Twitter
- Social Music: Top 5 Recommendation Services
- 5 Ways to Get More Out of Your Music Collection
- 16 Great Music Add-Ons for Firefox
- Social Music: Top 5 Sites to Build a Playlist

Tags: internet radio, Lists, music, music streaming, pandora, pandora tips

Life moves pretty fast. Sometimes it moves so fast we just don’t have time to stop and maintain all of our social networks individually. But that’s no reason to leave your Facebook profile barren, because you don’t even have to make it all the way to Facebook to update your status.

Here are some methods of updating your Facebook profile when on the go or while using some of the other networks and services you already use.

Update Facebook from Firefox

An easy to use Firefox extension called FireStatus can enable you to update your Facebook status right from a collapsible tray at the bottom of your browser. It also includes a URL shortening function as well, and you can set whether you’d like tinyURL or urlBorg as your short URL service in the preferences.

FireStatus can also handle updates to Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious and Identi.ca as well, making it a handy method for updating any of those services if you’re already in your browser.

Update Facebook from Twitter

There are a few ways to pipe your Twitter status updates right into Facebook, avoiding the need to double post items or spend a ton of time maintaining a dual-life on both networks.

Twitter to Facebook – This Facebook app simply sends all your Twitter updates right into Facebook as status updates with one important exception: @reply tweets will not appear.

Selective Twitter – If you’re looking for more manual control over exactly which Twitter updates make it over to Facebook, you might want to try this app instead. It only sends tweets at Facebook status updates if you include the hashtag #fb at the end of your message.

Twitter clients – Once you’ve set up either of the above Facebook apps to pipe Twitter into Facebook, you can of course use any desktop or mobile Twitter client to continue updating your Facebook status as well.

Update Facebook from Text Messages (SMS or MMS)

Facebook has mobile services built right in, making it easy to both send status updates in and get information back out to your phone. To enable posting from your phone, go to the Mobile tab under your Account Settings. You’ll have to Add a Phone number to associate it with your account and begin sending status updates, so click on the Add phone number link.

You’ll be prompted to choose your carrier, then send a text message to Facebook from your phone. The Facebook mobile number is 32665 (FBOOK), which you’ll probably want to add to your contacts list for easy retrieval. Facebook will send back a confirmation code when it receives your SMS, which you then enter into the next step.

After successfully linking your mobile phone to your account, you can begin sending status updates to 32665. You can also modify the type and frequency of text alerts sent back to your phone when friends interact with your profile or send you messages, and set whether or not you want to receive confirmation messages when updating from your phone. You can even turn off all the incoming text alerts and still continue to send your own status updates to Facebook.

To send photos or videos by MMS, you essentially want to follow the protocol in the email section below. Find your personalized upload email address and use that as the recipient for your MMS message, and you can send media right from your phone to Facebook.

Update Facebook by Email

Facebook added a way for you to send photos or videos to your profile page via email. You can find your unique personal upload email on the Facebook mobile page. Simply attach the photos or videos you’d like to send in your email, and use the subject line as the caption (if you upload more than one piece of media at a time, they will all get the same caption). By default the media you send will be incorporated into your “Mobile Upload” photo album, subject to its privacy settings.

Thanks to commenters Robert Basil and Andrew for pointing out that there’s another great option that could belong either in this category or in the status update services section below: Posterous is another excellent service that will easily update several social services including Facebook by email.

Update Facebook from Status Update Services

Status update services are emerging out of the swelling sea of social sites and the growing need to manage them all. These sites typically store your login credentials for all the networks you participate in, and allow you to update any or all of them in one fell swoop. They can save you the time updating lots of individual sites when what you really want is the same message broadcast multiple places.

Two very full-featured offerings in this category are ping.fm and hellotxt. Of the two, hellotxt has been around longer (since 2007), although ping.fm has grown fairly popular in its own right. Both services offer posting to dozens of social networks from a number of different sources, so you may simply want to try both and decide which one you like best.

Update Facebook from Instant Messenger

This is a simple solution, because it’s the same as the previous section. You can use either ping.fm or hellotxt to send updates to Facebook from your instant messenger client. Typically you’ll add a special chat bot that you need to send messages to in order to update your Facebook status. Services supported include AOL Instant Messenger, Gtalk / Jabber, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and MSN.

Update Facebook from Third-Party Sites

The number of sites that support sending updates to Facebook either through the API or as an application continue to grow every day. If it’s a service you use frequently and want to pipe into Facebook, it’s worth investigating whether the site supports it, provides an app, or whether a third-party has developed a connector app to link the two services.

Just a few of the sites and services that can be connected to your Facebook page include Pandora, Wordpress via Wordbook, last.fm (you might want to try their What I’m Listening To app for a simpler method as well), Flickr, Qik, Ustream, gamerDNA, Raptr, and more.

Additionally, almost anything that outputs an RSS feed can be imported to your Facebook profile via the Notes application. Any time you update that site, service or feed, it will also then be displayed on your Facebook profile.

Just take care about which sites you route into each other, in case you inadvertently end up double posting (or worse!) items to your feed. Take a few moments and plan out which services you think your Facebook friends would even care about as well — it’s not necessarily the best idea to dump absolutely everything you do everywhere into your profile. But used thoughtfully and in moderation, you can keep an active Facebook profile going without exhausting yourself trying to keep all your networks updated on your every thought and breakfast selection.

Have any other useful tips for posting to Facebook without going to Facebook? Are there other Facebook tips you’d like to see here? Let us know in the comments!

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- 20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Facebook Experience
- 10 Fantastic iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect
- The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook
- Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?
- HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook

Tags: facebook, facebook tips, hellotxt, MMS, ping.fm, SMS, status updates

With the ink on the deal still fresh, many are wondering what exactly will come out of the Facebook-FriendFeed acquisition deal. And many who’ve never used FriendFeed before may be wondering what the big deal is: why bother with Yet Another Social Network?

If you’re new to FriendFeed or have perhaps tried it and wandered away, your curiosity might be piqued now. If so, we have a quick power tip for you to help take advantage of its unique features right away.

If you’ve ever used the saved searches feature on Twitter you’re going to immediately understand the power of the equivalent feature on FriendFeed. The great thing about FriendFeed’s saved searches feature, however, is that it’s a lot more customizable.

The saved searches interface makes use of the advanced search features built into FriendFeed to give you fine-grained controls in the following areas:

Search only within specific groups – Once you’ve organized your FriendFeed contacts into groups (work, family, local, etc.), you can save searches only within that particular group. For example if you only wanted to know when your old college buddies are talking about your upcoming reunion, limit a keyword search for “reunion” within that friend group. You can even create an ad hoc list of people to include in the search without having to create a full group as well.

Search only within the title or within comments – You can limit search results to keywords found only within the title of an entry or even only within comments on entries.

Search only entries commented on or liked by specific people – This option can help float very important people in your list to the top of your attention when they interact with your activity stream around specific issues.

Search only within entries with a minimum threshold of comments or likes – This option helps surface only items with a certain level of attention or activity.

Advanced Search Operators

In addition to the fine-grained level of control in saved searches, FriendFeed also provides a handful of advanced search operators you can make use of from the regular search bar as well as within saved searches (although some functions overlap).

from: – Returns only search results from a particular user. Use a comma to search multiple users (Example: from:jeff,karen would return results from both jeff and karen).

group: – Returns only search results from a particular group. Use a comma to search multiple groups (Example: from:FriendFeed Hacks, Enterprise 2.0 would return results from both those groups).

friends: – This taps into FriendFeed’s powerful “friend of a friend” function to return search results only from a user’s friends (Example: friends:karen would return results only from karen’s friends).

service: – Limits search results only to those items brought in from a specific service. For example, if you wanted to get a zeitgeist of what people on Facebook have been saying about the acquisition, you might search All FriendFeed users with the query “friendfeed acquisition service:facebook.”

intitle: – Returns results with the specified term appearing in the title of the entry (Example: intitle:Veronica Mars).

incomment: – Returns results with the specified term appearing in a comment (Example: incomment:lame).

comment: – Returns results with comments from a particular user or user. Use a comma to search multiple users (Example: comment:jeff,karen would return items commented on by either jeff or karen).

comments: – Returns results with at minimum this many comments (Example: comments:20 would search only within items that had at least 20 comments).

like: – Returns results liked by a particular user or user. Use a comma to search multiple users (Example: like:jeff,karen would return items liked by either jeff or karen).

likes: – Returns results with at minimum this many likes (Example: likes:20 would search only within items that had been liked by at least 20 people).

- – This syntax excludes a word, user or term from your search. For example to look for items that discuss FriendFeed without mentioning Facebook, you’d use the search query “friendfeed -facebook.”

, – As mentioned in some of the other operators above, the comma acts to add multiple users or terms to an advanced search flag. Search geeks call this an “OR” search because it finds all results that mention Term A OR Term B.

There you have it — if you’re just diving into FriendFeed for the first time or if you haven’t been sure what all the fuss is about, give the Saved Searches feature a try and go the extra mile with the advanced search operators.

What other FriendFeed features would you like to know about? And more broadly, what other tips or tricks would you like to see us cover here? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: friendfeed, friendfeed tips, Search, tips, tricks

Nothing makes a blog post more eye-catching than a great header image, but not all publishers have artistic talent. And even accomplished digital creatives often crave some found material to start from or work with in a project. Luckily for all of the above, sources abound for finding a compelling photo to grab your readers’ eyes and draw them in, or to locate fresh multimedia to remix.

Creative Commons search

You may be familiar with the Creative Commons free licenses that aim to give creators more freedom to allow sharing and remixing of their content. If not, you can find out more about the history of the organization and the different types of licenses from their About page. The most important thing to note is that many CC-licensed images, audio and video files are usable on your blog or site, typically with credit given to the original creator — a quick and easy way to hat-tip the source of the media you’re using.

Here are several excellent spots to search large pools of Creative Commons-licensed images:

1. Creative Commons search: this search page aggregates several CC searches into a handy tabbed interface.

2. Yahoo Creative Commons search: search within the Yahoo index for CC-licensed media.

3. Flickr Creative Commons search: search just within Yahoo’s Flickr for CC-licensed images. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for photography in a more artistic vein.

4. Google Advanced Search: though Yahoo has been offering its CC-specific search for a while, Google much later caught up by adding some options to its advanced search interface. Expand the “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” link to access the “Usage rights” dropdown.

Free stock and public domain images

Need a professional-looking image but don’t have the budget for spendy stock photo houses? Check out these great alternatives for free stock photography. Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.

5. Stock.XCHNG: SXC is a community of photographers who share their work free of charge for use as stock imagery. Grab some shots from here, share your own, and chat with other photographers in the community forum.

6. MorgueFile: Using its own specially-adapted morgueFile Free License, this site offers free commercially usable and remixable high resolution digital stock photography without any attribution requirement so long as you don’t claim ownership or resell unaltered works as is.

7. Everystockphoto: A search engine for free photos, Everystockphoto also allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos. Source and licensing information for each image is available on the search results pages below the photo.

8. PDphoto: Thousands of royalty free and public domain images are searchable here, with high-resolution versions available for many of the photos for a small fee.

9. Openphoto.net: Offers photographic resources under Creative Commons licensing from an open network of photographers, focusing on animals, nature, landscape, architecture, still life, and technology.

10. FreeDigitalPhotos.net: Searchable collection of royalty free photos for corporate or personal use, with high resolution versions available for purchase.

11. PicFindr: Aggregate search engine for free stock images from several of the above sites and others, PicFindr compiles the search results into a single interface with links to the individual photos from their thumbnails.

WikiMedia Commons

Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. To browse within the free subcategories, there’s a handy landing page branching off into various free license repositories, and you can browse by individual media types as well. Just be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:

12. Public domain

13. Creative Commons

14. Sound

15. Video

Free audio sources

Whether you need some background music for a video project, some fresh tunes to incorporate into a music blog, or are looking for audio from a particular geographic location, these free audio file resources may have a usable sound waiting for you. As with the image sources above, always be sure to double check the license for any particular file you want to use and follow its attribution guidelines if applicable.

16. opsound: A community of musicians and sound artists, opsound contributors upload their works under Creative Commons licenses for sharing and remixing.

17. soundtransit: A searchable archive of field recordings from all over the world, soundtransit’s community shares recordings under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

18. pdsounds.org: The mission of pdsounds is to capture the acoustic phenomena in the environment of our daily lives and contribute them to the public domain for free and unfettered reuse. Search for something specific or browse the catalog of public domain sounds.

19. Internet archive open source audio: One subsection of the mighty Internet Archive collection, the open source audio section is primarily full of reusable Creative Commons-licensed sound files. You can also find usable audio files pocketed throughout the broader Audio collection as well.

Free video sources

Although almost everything including Tiger Woods getting air and browser-induced projectile vomiting is embeddable these days, if you need video footage that’s remixable or republishable these are some great destinations to check out.

20. Internet Archive Moving Images Collection: the Internet Archive is a big winner in this category, with thousands of free movies, films, and videos on hand featuring everything from classic feature-length films to zany educational shorts shown to impressionable school children in the 50s, 60s and 70s to cartoons now old enough to be in the public domain.

21. Open Source Cinema: A community site for creating and remixing video online, users upload footage under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

22. Vimeo: You can browse the videos tagged with Creative Commons or use a complex search query to search for videos tagged both “creativecommons” and the keyword you’re looking for.

23. Flickr: You can use Flickr’s Advanced Search interface to look only within video content that’s Creative Commons-licensed.

Further resources

Beyond the primarily larger collections above, there are many smaller sources for Creative Commons and remix-friendly media from individual creators, collectors and collectives. If you’ve got the time to traverse some of these, you could find even more usable media off the beaten path.

24. Wikipedia list of public domain sources

25. TeacherLibrarianWiki’s list of copyright-friendly image sources

26. NASA: The vast majority of images, audio and video published by NASA are not copyrighted and may be reused, although for commercial usage be aware of NASA’s non-endorsement guidelines.

More blogger resources from Mashable:

- Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles
- 25 Great Blogger Widgets
- A Guide to Protecting Your Online Identity
- 8 of the Best Social Media Extensions for Joomla

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Johnnyscriv

Tags: blogging, creative commons, public domain, remix culture

There may be one more sure thing in life beyond death and taxes: spammers. Twitter is of course no stranger to the scourge, and TweetBlocker is a new tool designed to help you get rid of any spam accounts you’ve inadvertently managed to follow, whether in haste or through the use of auto-follow.

Using a combination of blacklist-style identification and Bayesian algorithms for identifying spammers from the contents of their tweets, this app from the folks at HashRocket adds another tool to our collective belts for fighting back against Twitter spam.

After authenticating your Twitter account, TweetBlocker generates a list of your followers with a numerical score as well as at-a-glance letter grades according to how spammy the service thinks they are, with A+ being the best and F the worst. From here you have the option to block or simply unfollow each account. Rolling over a user’s icon pops up a list of their most recent tweets so you can quickly double check any accounts you might be on the fence about.

In our tests we did find some false positives in our list as well as some questionably low grades for relatively popular accounts (see above — blip.tv passes with flying colors while Blip.fm seems dangerously close to repeating the fourth grade), but the recent tweets rollover function should help you make sure you’re not inadvertently blocking or unfollowing someone having a momentary lapse of reason or temporary absence from Twitter.

And as far as tools for helping cut the spam go, another addition to the arsenal — particularly one so easy to use — is entirely welcome to the Twitterverse.

Tags: auto-follow, spam, TweetBlocker, twitter