With the list of free players growing all the time (iffy companies are cropping up all over the web like raging teen acne – awful to behold and tough to stamp out) it’s time to narrow your choice down to the best available players.

I’ve listed 3 really good free online radio players for your desktop (Windows, Mac and Linux).

For PC

Screamer Radio

This free radio phenomenon is described in detail here. Screamer is simple to use and can handle just about any streaming format.

• Shoutcast and Icecast MP3 Streaming
• Icecast OGG Vorbis Streaming
• WMA Streaming
• AAC Streaming

Best of all, it’s ad free and virtually indetectable (sound aside, of course). Your computer won’t even feel it, and the player window itself is teeny tiny.

By searching the Screamer radio directory, you can build a presets list – this is the collection of stations the app has collected for you. You can search by genre, language, network or region. The selection of genres is very broad and gets quite exotic, from Anime Music to something called ‘Reggaeton’. There’s also a section called ‘Salsa, Bachata, Merengue’ and a category of Nerd Music. Nerd Music!

The sheer extent of the radio database is the best thing about Screamer. But if that doesn’t impress you, maybe you’ll be moved by its handy< a href=”http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/record-streaming-audio-with-screamer-radio/”>extra functions. Screamer doubles as a recorder and encoder!

Features include:

• Recording buffer: start recording in the middle and still save the entire song!
• Direct MP3 Audio stream saving, no loss of quality.
• Direct OGG Vorbis stream saving, no loss of quality.
• Or encode OGG Vorbis as MP3 using Lame
• Encode WMA or AAC to MP3 using Lame

Lame has an awful name. It’s anything but! This is considered one of the best mp3 encoders at mid to high bitrates.

To select the destination folder for your recorded tracks, go to the Screamer Preferences window and select the Recording tab. You can also define file name patterns and buffer sizes here.

In the General Preferences window, you can set Display and Startup options. For example, hide Screamer Startup if it annoys you and make this little player as inconspicuous as possible.

For Windows or Mac

Musicovery. This one is highly interactive and customisable – very easy to use. It was good enough for our editor Aibek, who mentioned it as one of his favorite online music services! Commentators gush that Musicovery is great for discovering new music because of the plethora of ways you can define your tastes, do searches and get recommendations.

Most famously… it’s mood-searchable!

What you do is define the mood you want on the north-south-east-west compass, which reminds me those political compasses where you answer some questions about your social attitudes and get placed on a spectrum: welfare state proponent vs. free market capitalist (up and down scale) AND socially liberal vs. socially conservative (left and right scale).

Musicovery does the same with mood by getting you to place yourself between Dark and Positive, and Energetic and Calm.

Once you’ve clicked somewhere on this 2D chart, you must limit yourself to an era and a genre.

This is what you see when you ask for dark, energetic electro!

For Mac users: Musicovery has a plugin that lets you listen via iTunes. A simple .dmg download will let you use this incredible popular streamer.

For Linux

Rhythmbox

Originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes, Rhythmbox is based on the powerful GStreamer open source framework.  Linux users will get:

1. An easy to use browser

The Rhythmbox tab list (on the far left) allows you to view your Play Queue, Library, Podcasts, Radio preferences and Last.fm streams. So, you get a lot more than radio streaming. And people whinge about the poor player options on Linux!

2. Comprehensive audio format support through GStreamer

GStreamer is a multimedia framework written in C which allows the programmer to create media-handling components like audio and video playback , recording, streaming and editing. The popular Entertainer media center for Linux (mentioned in this article) uses this technology. It’s tops.

3. Options to transfer music to and from iPod, MTP, and USB Mass Storage music players

The iPod tab will appear on the left when you connect your device, just like on iTunes.

4. Direct access to Jamendo

Jamendo is marketed as a ‘new model for artists to promote, publish and get paid for their music’, and Simon previously covered it in his article about the best sites to download music.

With Rhythmbox, you get access to the immense range of Jamendo downloads. These are free and legal music downloads shared under Creative Commons licenses.

5. Last.fm streaming

Find the Last.fm plugin here and import a lot of the things that  made that player great. Build a Last.fm station straight from Rhythmbox!

6. Plugins

There is an impressive list of third party plugins available on the Rhythmbox Developer page. You’ll also find desktop art, ripping/recording devices and a plugin called Remuco that lets you control Rhythmbox remotely from your cell phone!

Besides Rhythmbox, you can also find a bunch of alternative here, as Damien has listed out.

What are you favourite desktop radio players? Do you use an app that wasn’t listed here? Do share them with us in the comments!

The first couple of times this happened to me I thought “˜ah well, thus is the fickle nature of online readers’ and got on with things. I was using BlogPatrol at the time (steer clear of it) and began to get suspicious when the spikes/dips got bigger and more random. The final straw came when I checked my traffic for February 08 and found that it was vastly different to what I remembered. How can your February visitor numbers change after February is over?

There is a lot of unreliable traffic tracking software out there ““ actually I’d say you shouldn’t trust most of it.

Enter Google Analytics. Who better to track your site than a big reliable name, and the very people who will be crawling your page to determine your PageRank?!

The layout of Analytics can be a little daunting but once you master it you’ll never look back.

Here are six of the best resources, with some of the handiest Google Analytics tips out there, starting from the simplest and moving on to trickier stuff.

How To Use Google Analytics For Beginners by Mahalo

The perfect, no-nonsense step-by-step guide, aimed at absolute novices. That is, you’ll get tips on actually setting up a Google account and inserting the Analytics tracking code into your page, as well as advice about navigating the Analytics dashboard.

Mahalo’s guide will be particularly useful for new WordPress users as it tells you exactly how and where to insert your code ““ that’s bound to be the hard part for a lot of newbies.

Steps 3, 4 and 5 are “˜Get an Overview of Your Site Performance’, “˜See How Your Site is Performing Daily and Hourly’ and “˜See Where Your Traffic is Coming From’, and helpful screenshots are provided.

Google Analytics For Beginners ““ How To Make The Most Of Your Traffic Reports by Flyte

This one doesn’t cover setup and it offers more of a personal touch ““ discover how to generate reports that are some of the “˜most useful’, in the author’s opinion. It’s pretty spot on: you’ll learn how to generate:

• A Visitors Overview report. See how much traffic you have, how many page views (as opposed to unique visitors), the average time spent on your site and your bounce rate (the percentage of people who only visit one page on your site before they “˜bounce’ somewhere else). See it all in one handy graph!

• A Traffic Sources Overview in graph form. See whether your visitors are coming from Referring Sites, whether they’re finding you on search engines or whether they’re referring themselves.

• A Referring Sites Overview in table form. See a list of the specific sites your visitors are coming from. For example. I use this to see how many people are coming to my blog from my MakeUseOf author page!

• Keywords Overview in table form. What keywords did your visitors enter into Google (and other search engines) in order to find you? Great for learning which keywords are useful to you.

• Flyte’s guide is written clearly and provides plenty of images ““ a really useful resource.

8 Useful Google Analyics Tips by Jatex’s Weblog

A little more advanced. This one is really neat ““ they provide simple code that lets you tinker with Analytics to get what you need.

For example, Tip 1 gives a line of generic code you can insert whenever you put an external link on your site. Say your blog has a link to a YouTube video- insert this code and Analytics will start tracking how many people are disappearing to go and view it!

Also learn how to:

• Exclude internal visitors from your reports using a filter
• Track full referred URL’s (because sometimes referring sites will append their general URL instead of a specific one ie. www.makeuseof.com instead of www.makeuseof.com/google-analytics-tips-you-should-know-about)
• Track eCommerce transactions and
• Track exact Adwords keywords!

Google Analytics Videos On The Web by The Official Google Analytics Blog

For the visual learner ““ Google’s very own Google Analytics video playlist! Find full-length videos on advanced Analytics techniques.

Get Google Analytics On Your iphone by Conor Darcy Dundalk

An iphone afficionado explains how to access Analytics data on your iphone using some handy software.

7 Analytics Plugins & Reports You Probably Didn’t Know About by Aimclear

Plugins that let you see data numbers instead of percentages, a “˜What’s Changed’ report that tells you which referring sites to keep your eye on, a device for integrating Analytics with Google Docs and much more.

If I have missed any other good Google Analytics tips, be sure to put the links in the comments.

The site is growing in leaps and bounds. As the tentacles of the Creative Commons organisation lengthen and curl, and its presence is felt in every corner of the web (who hasn’t read a plethora of blogs with the disclaimer ‘licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 by-nd license’, or some such) it’s time to explore how online users can get the most out of this newfangled intellectual copyright phenomenon.

1. Search for Usable Content

If you’re a blogger, musician, photographer, researcher, writer or creative person of any kind, you’ll know how annoying it is to chase up ‘permission’ to use the images, soundbytes etc. you want to include in your work. Creative Commons licenses make this easy by dividing content into categories, and allowing people to use content as long as they agree to the terms (for example,  ‘No Derivatives’ means you can use the content as long as you don’t modify it, and ‘Attribution’ means you must give credit to the original author/creator). No need to send a sycophantic email (‘I LOVE this image! Can I reproduce it?’) to a photographer ever again.

Head to the Creative Commons search website and you’ll see an entry bar with two adjacent search options. Check the appropriate box and enter your search term.

Below that you’ll see a list of tabs – three familiar ones (Google, Yahoo, Flickr) and three relative obscurities (blip.tv, OWL music search and SpinXpress).

Now, this is an important thing to recognise about Creative Commons. The organisation doesn’t actually keep a comprehensive database of licensed content. There’s been a small trickle of criticism over this, because of the potential for fraud that it introduces (if I really wanted to I could apply for a license, get it, then destroy all copies of my licensed content and be free to accuse a random, innocent remix artist of nicking my stuff because no one has records of what I actually licensed in the first place) But that’s not worth going into here. So far, no earth-shattering lawsuits and CC is looking into building a database.

The point I was making is that when you do a Creative Commons search, you still need to nominate a search directory. If you nominate Google you’ll get a bunch of (hopefully) relevant articles. Interested in images? All the usual Google rules apply – you’re still able to fine tune your search by typing ‘images’ after the query term. What you’re doing is a Google search restricted to Creative Commons licensed content. The same goes for the other directories (Flickr, Yahoo, etc).

Note: Always use the top (green border) entry bar to limit search results to Creative Commons content. The lower entry bar (under the directory tabs) does not limit results – it does a standard search with Google, Yahoo, etc.

2. Learn the Jargon

When you stumble upon something fabulous you want to use, it’s important to understand what it means for something to be licensed under a ‘Creative Commons Attribution- No Derivative Works 2.5 License’, for example.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Creative Commons has four sets of license terms.

Attribution – the original author/creator must be credited.

Non-Commercial - the work must not be used for commercial purposes.

No Derivatives – the work must not be modified.

Share-alike – any derivative works must be licensed under the same Creative Commons license.

These are combined to produce the variety of CC licenses available.

Some popular combinations are by- nd (Attribution + No Derivatives) and by-sa (Attribution + Share-Alike). ‘No Derivatives’ and ‘Share-Alike’ are obviously mutually exclusive. You’ll never see these together.

Sometimes people will only use abbreviations and symbols to specify how their work is licensed, so it helps to know them.

Attribution = (by)

No Derivatives= (nd)

Non-Commercial =(nc)

Share-Alike = (sa)

3. Know the Alternative Databases (what is blip.tv anyway?)

Who can be bothered, right? That’s what we’re here for! Here is a run-down of three less common Creative Commons search databases.

blip.tv

Kind of what it sounds like. A database of user-generated video content. The focus is on content creators making ‘shows’ or ‘serialised content’, not posting friends, family and pet videos. This is how blip.tv has distanced itself from YouTube.

A wide range of upload formats are available, from WMV and MPEG to obscurities like Ogg.

OWL music search

This one is pretty spiffy. Search for music not by entering keywords, but by uploading your sound files. OWL will search their database for songs that are similar! You can see how this could be useful for remixers.

SpinXpress

All the content here is Creative Commons licensed. Search an incomplete database of CC content, from within Flickr, blip.tv and a number of other archives.

SpinXpress also has a ‘community’ element- users are encouraged to sign up and collaborate with others uploading to the service.

Now that you know all about Creative Commons, why not submit your images and photos to the MakeUseOf Flickr photo group?

One minute I was trawling for articles, blissfully convinced that Facebook was all I’d ever need to connect me to items of real time relevance. The next I was pulled into a vortex created by masterminds so ambitious and intrusive, they plan to index the worlds information. Yes, I’m talking about Google (and their latest uber-success, iGoogle).

iGoogle began its life with the name ‘Google Personalised Homepage’, briefly became ‘Google IG’, and a few makeovers later, emerged as iGoogle, a name that makes it sound like an Apple product (iPod, iTunes). Nobody seems to agree on what the most popular startpage service is but iGoogle is up there. Users are so passionate about their iGoogle pages that recent changes were met with uproar and violent protestation. The ‘changes’ were basically a new sidebar and the removal of some gadget resizing privileges. Yep, people are obsessed.

iGoogle isn’t just for accessing feeds from your favourite sites; there is a growing catalogue of gadgets from reputable developers. Google are also inviting people to create gadgets, both practical ones and social stuff of the ‘here’s what I’m up to right now’ Twitter/Facebook variety. You can see why people are saying it’s the next Facebook. What’s good about iGoogle is that the gadgets tend to be useful (feeds, search aids, shortcuts), not vacuous (throw a mudpie at your friends! become a werewolf/pirate/vampire!) and no one – absolutely no one – is going to poke you, ‘get low with’ you, post lewd comments your mum can read or invite you to rate their sexiness.

Here are the best of the best iGoogle gadgets for streamlining your online life:

1. A Podcast Player

If I say “I heart this” does that blow or bolster its case? A Podcast Player is a neat little player with a search facility; enter your search term into the bar at the top, choose your favourite podcast directory from the scroll-down list, and away you go. The options are Feedster, all4RSS, Podkast, Digitalpodcast and Podscope.

If you don’t have a favourite, I recommend the Podscope directory; here you can find a piece of audio according to the words that are spoken in it!

For example, if you want to find podcasts that mention Obama, simply enter ‘Obama’, select ‘Podscope’, press ‘Find’ and voila: ‘A Podcast Player’ returns a list of audio and the exact times (0:53, 1:45, 1:49) the keyword Obama is mentioned! Pretty amazing, and great for people like me who love to listen to news (or any podcast) as they work on the computer. You’ll find a lot of interesting stuff.

2. Driving Directions

The beauty of iGoogle is that the gadgets are integrated so well with key Google services. Driving Directions is the ultimate gadget for people who finds themselves scrolling dumbly in Google Maps or thumbing through a street directory, trying to trace journeys that jump from page 46 to 49B to 109, back to page 46 and so on.

With Driving Directions you have two entry bars (‘From’ and ‘To’). Enter your starting address and destination and you’re redirected to Google Maps, where the page is sized just so and your route easily plotted. You also have the option of sharing the map by pressing ‘Send’ or ‘Link’ in the top right hand corner.

Google Maps is great because it contains business information; there is a large and growing catalogue of business locations, so you can search by, say, the name of a restaurant or bar even if you don’t know the address. A good startpage shortcut to a useful service.

3. Digg

Not sure which feeds to track on iGoogle? Why not be a sheep and let public opinion decide?  Digg is the ultimate online popularity contest; the Digg iGoogle gadget lets you keep track of the articles people are digging.

Click the tabs at the top of the gadgets to view either News, Video, Images or All Content, or you can opt to see a list of what your friends are digging (if you have any Digg friends).

To filter according to content, open the scroll-down menu in the top righthand corner and choose between Science, Technology, Entertainment, World and Business, Lifestyle, Sports, Gaming and Offbeat. The gadget is updated continuously, so you’ll know as soon as something rises in the Digg ranks. Keep track of what’s creating buzz on the web from the safety of your startpage.

4. Facebook

A sprawling page within a sprawling page. Once upon a time Facebook was my number one web destination. Now it’s just another little box on my iGoogle page. Like a big fish swallowing all the little ones, Google is insatiable and unstoppable.

Who can resist? No need to visit Facebook anymore; just add the Facebook gadget to iGoogle and keep track of who, exactly, is poking you.

5. Memba Velodoc

To be fair, Velodoc is a great large file sharing service, and would deserve a mention even if they didn’t have an iGoogle gadget. The fact that they do just confirms how damn fantastic they are.

Have a large file you can’t send via Hotmail or Gmail? No need to burn a CD, send anything via post, sign up with some paid site, or even register with anyone.

Enter your email into the Velodoc file sharing gadget and the ‘Browse’ button will appear. Search your directories for the file you want to send, click it and send away.

Now, this is what’s great about the Velodoc service. The person you select as your recipient will receive an email. They’ll open it and find a neat little link. They’ll click that link and be directed to another neat little page- minimal text, no images- where they can download your file.

For a while I was using Sendspace (another free large file sharing service) and thought it was fine until I actually opened what I was sending. It was all pop-up ads, blocks of weird text and flashing arrows next to the words ‘Download Here’! After you opened my file everything was good, but that interim page was a killer: really gaudy and unprofessional looking. Not good if you’re sending files that are supposed to land you a job, which is what I was doing.

Don’t make the same mistake I did. Send files linked from nice-looking pages, and do it in your iGoogle. Great for people who send a lot of audio files, images or videos.

6. Anagram

Another shortcut to Google services – this time to Google Accounts and Google Calendar.

Anagram is really just an efficient way to save contact details to Google Accounts and add events to Google Calendar. No need to navigate all the way to Accounts and enter somebody’s number, name, etc. Simply enter their information in the Anagram text box in an incoherent blob. For example

Bob 77447744 3 Grate St

You don’t even need to keep pressing enter. Anagram will do the rest for you. A lazy person’s dream, and perfect for when you need to take details down fast.

Calendar details work the same way; this time you’re writing ‘Staff Lunch 3 November 5:30′. Anagram will understand what you’re doing and submit the information to Google Calendar.

7. Dictionary.com and Wikipedia

Two commonly used references in one handy gadget. Flip from tab to tab to alternate between Wikipedia and Dictionary. Results open in a new window, so your iGoogle is safe and secure.

8. Internet Bandwidth Speed Test

Created by an independent developer and applauded for its accuracy, this quick and easy speed test estimates your bandwidth and places you on a spectrum between plodding dial-up and hardcore DSL.

9. World Webcams

For the voyeur inside us all. Spice up your iGoogle with popular webcams from all over the world. Watch a beach in the south of France one day and a bustling scene from Rio the next. All pared down (of course) to iGoogle size. That’s about 5 x 6 cm, though if you’re really keen you can expand it to fill the page.

10. Random Google Gadgets

There are new gadgets popping up all the time, and we all know that the most useful, innovative stuff isn’t always the most publicised (remember our feature on Google services that get no love?).  With this gadget you can test drive a different, random Google app every day, and have the options of keeping stuff you like.

So what gadgets sit on your iGoogle page?   Which ones get your love?    You might also want to check out Mark’s earlier article from May this year on how to make your own personalised iGoogle gadgets.