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.

Now there is a chance to share these tastes through a new group on last.fm for Open University staff, students, fans and anybody else who fancies joining in. Groups on last.fm work by combining the playlists of their members to get a shared playlist, in our case a kind of "soundtrack to the OU". The way groups work has recently been improved so it will be interesting to see how this works. At the moment there are only a couple of us on there so join in soon otherwise the playlist will be dominated by my dodgy musical tastes!

The group can be found at:

http://www.last.fm/group/The+Open+University/

You can also have a listen here!