Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day ... and more!

‘The world's biggest free music service’

>> Last FM
I’ve been a fan of this site for a few years. It’s an interesting mixture of online radio, music recommendations and MySpace-ish social networking, but until now it’s tended to appeal mainly to younger users or music geeks. This week the site has had a major upgrade which is likely to make it much more appealing even to the least geeky of music fans

Site visitors in the UK, US and Germany can now play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm site. They now bill themselves as ‘the world's biggest free music service’. You can listen to each track up to three times in full. After that, you can still access 30” clips, and find links to buy that track as a download or on CD.

In addition unsigned artists can upload their own music and get payed every time someone listens to their tracks via the site. If you choose to sign up and create a profile page, Last FM will track your listening habits, create an updating list your most listened-to songs and artists and generate lists of recommended tracks and artists based on your current favourites

Also mentioned today:

>> BBC teams up with MySpace

>> MySpace TV: BBC Worldwide

Yahoo Finds 2007

>> Yahoo Finds 2007
Search engine Yahoo's selection of the most innovative and interesting sites of 2007 includes several past Website of the Day selections:
>> Move Me
>> Doggy Snaps (and Catster)
>> Do The Green Thing

Virtual tourism / escapism

On a damp and dismal British Friday, thoughts inevitably turn to beaches and other exotic destinations:

>> Fabsearch
This new travel site trawls glossy magazines like Vogue, Tatler, and Vanity Fair for their best travel tips and features and archives them online by source and location. Site visitors can peruse the features for free and "clip" interesting sections in a "my clippings" file.

>> AfterSunrise
This a great escapist stressbuster – Watch videos of the sunrise on Miami Beach. Each short clip features beautiful beach views, soothing sounds and feelgood quotes from Miami’s early risers talking about what they’re looking forward to doing on the day of that sunrise.

>> Friday Game: Mynci Beach Volleyball
Where turquoise cartoon animals take on brown cartoon animals in a battle for oceanside volleyball supremacy .

Free Rice

>> Freerice
I’ve always been keen on sites which offer innovative ways to support charities; One of my first ever selections on Website of The Day was The Hunger Site, which asks visitors to click a button on the site in order to generate a donation of a cup of food to feed a starving person. Many similar sites have sprung up since the launch of the Huger Site in 1999, but Freerice.com is just 3 months old and has already had more impact than most click-to-donate sites.
Rather than just a click-to-donate model, Freerice offers a simple game to improve your vocabulary. For each multiple choice question you get right, site sponsors donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. In 3 months the site has already generated 13,388,082,990 grains of rice. The game automatically adjusts to your own vocabulary knowledge making it addictive as well as highly worthwhile.

Real Buzz

>> Real Buzz
I mentioned this as my first "new year, new you" type pick of 2007 - but it's well worth revisiting as they've added so many new features in the last year.
The site bills itself as the UK's biggest fitness and motivation site, with hundreds of pages aimed at 'people want to take up a new challenge but don’t know where or how to start'. As before it should appeal equally to committed fit-freaks and textbook couch potatoes. New features this year include Map Your Passion (plot your runs and fitness regimes on a customisable Google Map) and Pitch Your Passion (Upload YouTube style videos of you evangelising about your favourite forms of exercise). Meanwhile for those (myself included) who find reaching for the remote control to be energetic work, the Virtual Workout invites you to choose an activity (from treadmill to rowing via aerobics or squash) and enter your weight to see how many calories you’d burn off if you were to try that particular form of exercise for half an hour.

Also mentioned today:
>> Radio 2 Music Club presents: exclusive Jack Johnson live video