by SHANE SINNOTT

Hey, kids. I thought we’d take this week to do a bit of housecleaning, and go over some good Web sites we should all be familiar with. I have briefly touched on some of these in earlier columns, but, you know, we’ve probably forgotten anyway…

The Hype Machine (hypem.com): I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (as have many others), this site remains the best resource on the Web, outside of torrents, to quickly find an MP3 download, as well as to keep in touch with the (ugh) “blogosphere,” if that’s your thing. Simply search for any artist or track and it’ll find blogs for you that have links.

Swan Fungus (blog.swanfungus.com): This is my favourite music blog (it used to be called “Communications Major/English Minor”). It posts a lot of music that I like, obviously, but more than that, I like that the posts are only sometimes about music. A sample post might be “A baby mammoth was recently discovered frozen in Siberia. Scientists hope the animal might yield DNA samples that could be used to clone and effectively resurrect the extinct members of the elephant family.” And then, inexplicably, some Einsturzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle songs will be posted afterwards. Also notable are the MP3 mixtapes posted every Sunday, and in general the wide variety of music posted.

Stillepost (www.stillepost.ca/boards/index.php?board=6.0): The single best online resource for finding out what shows are going on in this city (click the “Show Listings” thread). If you venture into the message board itself, you’ll find, like on any online board, that there can be a lot of annoying people writing a lot of annoying stuff, but there’s good info interspersed throughout. Otherwise, just stick to the show listings, which are being updated regularly lately, and you’ll find the site extremely useful.

G2P.org: This is a deceptively simple-looking site that will track down MP3s online. What it does is automate a lot of specific and fancy features that Google has in order to find open directories of MP3 files, so just type “John Mayer” into the search bar at the top and you’re good to go.