I haven’t been posting much the last couple weeks because this has been sucking up all my free time. UStream is a site that lets people stream live video and audio from their webcams. There are all kinds of applications (I’m planning on using it to deliver real-time lectures to my online students this summer). Enter the Haggis has been using it to stream the majority of their shows live for the last couple weeks. What makes this different from taping a show to play on YouTube or something similar is the interactive aspect. There’s an associated chat room where fans (or students) can interact with each other or with the person on the live stream. There are all kinds of features I haven’t explored yet, too. If an indie band is lucky enough to have a tech geek for a member, this is a great promo tool.

In other news, I have a huge list of bands that I’m slowly checking out. I started with an old band that’s new to me, The Tragically Hip. I vaguely knew they were Canadian and folk-rock esque, but that was about it. I mentioned to my husband that I’d heard a Hip song that I liked and his answer was to produce everything the band had done up to the year 2000 from his CD collection! He was a big fan growing up, apparently. The things you learn about your spouse… So I’ve been working my way through their older catalog and have plans to get the seven (!) CDs we need to complete our collection.

One thing I love about the Haggis Head community is the widely varying musical tastes of the folks who hang out there. Here’s my list so far of bands to check out: Tegan and Sara, Metric, Eisley, Missy Higgins, Jump Little Children, Dar Williams, the Abrams Brothers, the Decemberists and I have a whole other list somewhere that I can’t lay my hands on at the moment. I’m going to be a busy girl…

So what’s in your MP3 player today?