Tuning in to the audio Internet

Clothing company Abercrombie and Fitch has introduced a new line of thong underwear for seven-year-old girls with "Eye Candy" and "Wink, wink" sewn on the front. Meanwhile, in the NBA Eastern Conference semi-finals, several fans heckled New Jersey Nets star Jason Kidd during Game 4, calling him a wife-beater. After the Nets won, Kidd yelled at the Boston fans: "I hope you choke. You choke."

Such are the bits of info – and, of course, other treasures and pleasures – that one can find in the world wide radio of the Internet. Internet radio stations and other sites that offer online live broadcast provide a gamut of music, news, sports highlights and other blah-blahs that keep listeners updated on the goings-on in different parts of the world and calm harried workers hunched over their computers on a hectic working day.

Radio, the traditional boom box we’ve been familiar with all our lives, is not what it used to be. Stations play the same "new" music hour after hour. Though you like Creed, listening to Scott Stapp sing about his sacrifice five straight times makes you realize that they’re just a bunch of hillbillies who just happened to know how to sing and play the guitar.

Enough of that. Internet radio stations and sites offer not just music and news. Some provide features that lets you program your own station. Thus, you get to hear all the music you want everytime, everyday without the reruns and without the Britney Spears, Mandy Moores and the Aguileras. Here’s a few sites where you can get music, news and more. So dial up, tune in and sit back.

launch.yahoo.com

Yahoo!’s own music site is simply a blast. To access the pre-programmed stations, just sign in with your Yahoo! ID and password (if you already have a Yahoo! e-mail account, that’s good enough). Once you get in, you can navigate using the links just below the header. You can choose to tune in to a variety of pre-set stations that sport special themes like 1960s Rock and One Hit Wonders.

Users can also opt to create their own stations. Once they do so, they’ll be asked to choose the music genres (blues, country, electronica, folk, holiday, jazz, miscellaneous, pop, R&B, rap, religious, rock, shows and movies, and world) that they want their personal station to play. After selecting their preferences, a special console pops up onscreen that enables listeners to increase or decrease the volume, find lyrics, and rate the song that’s playing as well as the album and the artist who made it. If you want, for example, Puddle of Mudd’s Blurry to play again in the future (not in the next hour), simply rate it 100. If you want to ban Linkin Park from your station’s playlist, just click the "x" at the bottom of the rate meter.

Users can also check out videos, artist profiles and exclusive interviews at launch.yahoo.com.

music.msn.com

MSN equally matches launch.yahoo’s personalization features but the site also has its own exclusive offerings. As with Yahoo!, users can access videos, read interviews, search artist bios, and choose the genres that they like. There are also pre-set stations to choose from as well as free downloads of the latest releases from popular artists. A special console also pops up through which listeners can rate songs and artists.

espnradio.com

Since it’s the playoff season again, we’ve tried to find a Net station that broadcasts NBA games for free. The playoff games happen in the morning when we’re either too sleepy to watch or too late for our nine-to-five job that we don’t even bother to watch the opening tip-off. We dropped by NBA.com recently to see if it broadcasts the games on the Net live. The site has an NBA radio all right, but you have to pay an amount to access the broadcast.

So we moved to espn.com. What we found was not the promised land but it’ll have to do. Espnradio.com broadcasts sports news and updates through its ESPN News service. Users can access this for free 24/7. Though it may not provide blow-by-blow accounts of what’s happening on the hardcourt, ESPN News gives regular summaries of the NBA games and other sports.