This post is inspired by an interaction I had the other day with one of my friends on Facebook who was curious to know if I was a musician (quite hilarious given the fact that I can barely sing). My Status Updates prior to that had been music I was sharing with my friends. Am guessing more than likely that you probably thought it would be cool to be able to do something like that.

I use a free service called Blip.fm. You can sign up for your account here.

A Blip.fm Home Page

Once you’ve signed up, you became a Blip.fm DJ. You can then search for music that you want to listen to. The search results give you an option to either preview a song, or to share it with others by blipping the song. When you blip the song, it is broadcast on every blip.fm user’s public timeline.

Immediately after you blip a song, blip.fm shows you other users that blipped the same song in the event you want to connect with them. You can connect with other users with the same music interests as you when you search by music or if you know their blip.fm username by using the syntax http://blip.fm/username.

When the song you blipped is broadcast on the public timeline, other blip.fm users that like the song may choose to  give you props, which can be considered a thumbs up for a good music selection. They may also choose to become a ‘listener’ to your ‘online radio statio’ by adding you to their favorites. Your listeners automatically receive all your blips in the Home tab. The Profile tab shows blips by you.

With blip.fm you may also choose to re-blip a song, add it to your playlist, bookmark and share it via the Addthis toolbar, buy the MP3 via Amazon or get the ringtone via Thumbplay.

Blip.fm also allows you to embed a song into a website such as the example below (I highly recommend that the site you are posting to allows you to use HTML code).

One thing I like about blip.fm is that it is an online playlist of songs you enjoy listening to, thus the reference to you being the DJ of your own online radio station. One thing I don’t like about blip.fm is that the songs are not hosted on their sites, rather on other sites and servers. This translates into songs being unavailable at times or not appearing on search results at all. A previous BusinessWeek article however indicated that blip.fm was in talks with the four major music labels to have their music hosted on its site.

Here’s another really cool part. Blip.fm also allows you to automatically send those updates to your other social networks, currently Twitter, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Livejournal, Jaiku and Last.fm. One social network tham you may notice missing from this list is Facebook; however if you use Twitter also, you may already know that you can use Twitter to update your Facebook status. In essence, you are updating your Facebook status using Blip.fm via Twitter.