URL:

http://www.brusheezy.com

What is Brusheezy?

Brusheezy is a gallery of community submitted free Photoshop brushes.  As any Photoshop designer would know, the use of Photoshop brushes is key to many graphic designs.  Use and manipulate your images with unique Photoshop brushes and you’re quickly on your way to designing professional looking graphics.

What you may not know about Brusheezy

Brusheezy has a couple sister sites, Vectoreezy and Flasheezy that have vector graphics and flashy files also available for free download.  Just a couple more elements to add to your graphic design arsenal.

Here’s a quick video on Brusheezy:

URL:

http://pipes.yahoo.com

What is Yahoo! Pipes?

Yahoo! Pipes is a tool to combine, filter, aggregate, and mashup content on the internet from a variety of sources.  The tool is free to use and you can see the design of anyone’s Pipe to learn how to design your own.  You can mashup RSS feeds, Yahoo Maps, and more.

What you may not know about Yahoo! Pipes

You can create a Pipe in minutes and is a great tool to aggregating content on the internet into 1 simple and easy to use RSS feed.  Providing a few RSS feeds you can join them and output just one feed for your RSS tool to read.

Here’s a quick video on Yahoo! Pipes:

URL:

http://www.last.fm

What is Last.fm?

Last.fm is a social music community that keeps you in touch with your music using a music recommendation system called “Audioscrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user’s computer or some portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (”scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites. (Read more at Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Last.fm

Last.fm has a great piece of software for your computer that will recognize your favorite music player, plug in to it, and track the music you listen to.  Over time the music that Last.fm tracks will help determine new music that you are interested in.  Last.fm will compare each artist with other artists in the system based off of what users are listening to.  Example, say I listen to Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, and Hinder, another users listens to Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, and Seether.  Based off of Last.fm’s analysis, you can conclude that listeners of Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace like Seether and Hinder.  So now Last.fm can recommend me Seether and the other listener Hinder.  See how that works?  Want to discover new music based off of what you are listening to?  Download Last.fm’s audioscrobbler and discover new music.
Watch this quick video on how to get Last.fm’s audioscrobbler and how it works with your favorite audio player: