All sorts of people connected with The Open University are blogging about their interests, experiences and knowledge they want to share with you. These people include not just academics but also librarians, tutors, techies and project managers all putting information out there and discussing ideas, it's a side of the OU that you might not have thought about, one that isn't immediately visible when you deal with the OU, or even work in the place, but it is quite an interesting side. If you put all of these people together you start to get a sense of what this community is talking about, the discussions within it and what is being considered for the future. Enter PlanetOU, the part of this site that tries to bring these voices together in one place.

Students and staff of The Open University may be far flung sometimes, but thanks to Web 2.0 new opportunities are arising all the time for them to connect. The latest of these is the chance to share musical tastes and contribute a shared playlist that can be listened to on an online radio player. Many of you may be familiar with last.fm, a service which can recommend and play music you might like based on music you have played previously.

The EEE does lots more fancy multimedia stuff. One great program that is on board already is Amarok (although it has been renamed Music Manager here). This has got to be one of the greats of the open source world. Through this application you can listen to your music collection, listen to internet radio, subscribe to podcasts and it integrates with last.fm (so you can listen to streams and scrobble tracks).

There comes a time, probably when you have heard James Blunt for the thirteenth time in the space of a couple of hours, that you start wondering if there is a better way to discover new music that you might like. Fortunately there is an answer, an answer that has been around for some time now it is last.fm which offers you the chance to discover new artists that you might like based on your existing taste.