Favorite Albums of 2008

It seems like every year I'm trying to figure out the best way to bookmark and display my favorite albums of the year. This year was no exception. To determine my favorites, I looked at a number of sources... first I created a smartlist in iTunes that just included music that was released in 2008 (and then another for 2007 to see what was "new to me" in '08 even if it was technically released last year). That information combined with some of my chart data from Last.fm and MyStrands.com helped me figure out what I listened to most. I then went and searched for each at AmazonMP3 (and eMusic for one import) and then bookmarked them using Delicious. Take the rss feed for those "bestof2008" tags and then feed them into an embeddable widget from YourMinis.

Yes, it shouldn't be this hard and I'm sure (or at least I hope) there is a much simplier way that I just happened to overlook. There were were things that *should* have worked much more easily but all seemed buggy and weren't producing the desired output. If there isn't then my resolution for 2009 will be to make sure something gets built. Anyway... enough soapboxing, here's the list. Enjoy them... I know I did.

UPDATE (1/08/2009): Here are a few of them for your listening pleasure... in their entirety.

Linkroll Broken

A couple of people pinged me today wondering where their companies went in my linkroll in the sidebar. It seems that the script I am using maxes out at 100 items, and they were rolling off the list in order of tenure. So, you will see that a number of very prominent companies in the space aren't in the sidebar, including notables like:

• Last.fm
• MyStrands
• Qloud
• Fiql

And a number of others. I'll have to find another script that lets me display more links, but in the meantime you can always see/subscribe to the entire list here:

http://del.icio.us/rss/jherskowitz/music2.0

Sorry guys, I wasn't dissing you.... but thanks for bringing it to my attention