How in the holy frijoles is it December already? And why do I get the same stressed, panicked feeling every year? And why do I harbor such resentment against those who get their Christmas shopping done early (or prance gaily around their yards stringing up their lights the day after Thanksgiving)?

*deep breath*

The truth is, when I put myself in the mindset of how much I enjoyed the holidays as a kid, I can actually get some of those warm, good time-y feelings back. And having two little kids adds to the fun too. But man oh man, the stress returns every year, as sure as the commercials.

Music, of course, is the key to bringing back some of that positive holiday energy. Since 1994, this collection of tunes has steered the way (or the sleigh, heh). I taped this special off the radio that holiday season. I’ve said this all before, but Bruce Cockburn is a warm, comforting musical presence in my life, and listening to him sing these great songs and play the guitar like only he can - well - it’s better than a fridge full of nog.

Now, Nanci Griffith joins Bruce here, and sings some songs of her own (”Wexford Carol”, “Grafton Street”, “Going Back to Georgia”, etc.). But it’s the Bruce tunes that resonate with me: “Shepherds” opens the show, and has always been a song that pops into my head throughout the year, for some reason: “Glooooooria, in the hiiiighest.” I’m not heavy into the religion, mind you, but when Bruce sings, I’m a believer; “Deer Dancing Around a Broken Mirror”, a spirited and lush instrumental tune; “Huron Carol”, a song written in the 1600’s by a Jesuit missionary to the Huron Indians, and sung in the Huron language. Bruce gives a wonderful introduction, and reads the English translation beforehand; and of course, two favorites of mine: “I’m Gonna Fly Someday” and “One Day I Walk”. Sublime.

Enjoy. And hey, happy holidays, eh? Oh, and always a reminder for you fellow Yanks that haven’t heard of Bruce from the great white north - it’s CO-Burn. Co sounding like So. Ho ho ho.

“Christmas with Cockburn”
The Columbia Records Radio Hour, 1994

Intro
Shepherds [mp3]
Wexford Carol (Nanci Griffith)
Brave Companion of the Road (NG)
Deer Dancing Around a Broken Mirror
I’m Gonna Fly Someday
Grafton Street (NG)
Going Back to Georgia (NG)
One Day I Walk / Intro to Huron Carol
Huron Carol [mp3]
Mary Had a Baby

[Download the ZIP]

A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All has redefined the holiday special for the new millennium. But it may also have redefined holiday songs for the 21st century as well, especially Willie Nelson and Stephen Colbert's "Little Dealer Boy." Think "Little Drummer Boy" 2.0, substitute the phrase "finest gifts" for marijuana, and you're there.

Or better yet, just check out the video of the entire song at right. It's a double-exposure romp that might make Jesus blush, if he wasn't already rumored to have used cannabis himself. After all, as Willie sings in the duet, cannabis is a "plant that smokes more sweetly than either frankincense or myrrh."

If you like the tune, you're probably going to love the rest of the bizarro standards found A Colbert Christmas, out now as an iTunes-only digital EP. Heck, you might even dig Toby Keith's War-On-Christmas shocker "Have I Got a Present For You," the very track that had me worried that Colbert's holiday special might suck.

Boy, was I wrong about that.

Meanwhile, "Little Dealer Boy" has caught some flak on Colbert Nation, but I think it is one of the finest Christmas tunes ever laid down. Am I high? Post a comment below and let me know.

See also:

• Review: Colbert Christmas Defends Santa, Beheads Heretics
• Could Stephen Colbert's Christmas Musical Suck?
• Colbert Bests Obama, Wins Marvel White House
• 'Truthiness' Could Swing Stephen Colbert Into Marvel White House
• Colbert Gets His Spider, Likes Neil Young Again
• 3001: A Stephen Colbert Space DNA Odyssey
• I Am Not a Jerk, Says Stephen Colbert

Matt Singley is a business process advisor that focuses on social media and UGC sociology. He authors a blog, Singley’s Blog Thoughts, about new (and sometimes old) technologies that can help organizations get ahead.

Each morning you get an obscenely-sized coffee, open your email and turn on your favorite music to lean into the upcoming workday. You are a part of an ever increasing group that starts their day with music and listens until it’s time to go to sleep. In this exploding market of online streaming audio, two companies are leading the way, fighting for a position at the top and looking to earn your loyalty: Pandora and Last.fm.

From a total traffic perspective the sites appear to be pretty close, with Pandora slightly overtaking Last.fm in the early part of 2008.  A closer look at the data however reveals that within the United States, Pandora is dominating in site traffic by almost double. Why the big difference stateside and elsewhere? Pandora is only offered to customers within the U.S. If you are an international reader, it appears the choice for you is obvious; if not, read on.

Let’s get right down to the music selection. I chose a wild mix of genre and popularity and was happy to see that both services not only recognized each artist but also seemed to really understand the type of music that each represented. Pandora started each channel with a song from the artist I selected, but Last.fm played for over an hour and never included them. I love listening to music while I work, so this part of the test was easy for me…I just listened to a lot of music on each service, all day long.

It wasn’t long before I came up with a sweeping generalization: Last.fm plays more Indie music, Pandora leans toward mainstream. As I continued to listen to each channel, I found myself going back to Pandora more and more. The music that was being selected for me just seemed better, it really seemed to understand what I liked. I think what sealed it for me was the inclusion of “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies in my Death Cab station. It just felt right.

Each service builds a custom channel based on artists or songs that you chose, and plays music that they think you will like. From an ease-of-use standpoint Pandora came out of the gate strong, I was signed up and listening to songs in less than a minute. I had to stumble around just a bit longer to get going with Last.fm, although it was still a mostly straightforward process.

With both Pandora and Last.fm working hard to create custom playlists for you, it’s important to take a quick look at the technology that is driving these two sites.  Last.fm uses a technique called scrobbling to determine which songs rise to the top and which sink.  Scrobbling begins by downloading their software and ranking the songs that you like. With millions of songs being scrobbled every day, this is a great way to crowdsource popularity.

From the Last.fm website:

Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.

Pandora selects music based on The Music Genome Project®, which is the work of “a group of musicians and music-loving technologists.” This seems to be more of an artisan effort, with this group listening to and defining the music, as opposed to the crowdsourcing method.  

Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

So which method of determining what you will like is better? Do millions of ratings on songs create a better experience for the listener, or does a select group of people tediously pouring over individual songs yield better results?  Before getting to the bottom line, I want to take a look at more of the overall experience.

Looking at the different UIs of the sites, I was naturally drawn to Pandora. The mostly Flash media player seemed a lot easier to use, and frankly a little sexier than the average looking player offered by the competitor. I was not disappointed with the Pandora interface, as I listened to songs I was able to click through to more information about the artists, album, songs and fans of the music all within the same page. Finding similar information over at Last.fm was certainly possible, but required separate page loads for each category that I wanted to find out about.

In terms of social networking, Last.fm is the clear leader. The media player page is set up like a blog that you can scroll down and leave a “shout” about the track as well as look through what others are saying. Last.fm also does a brilliant job of incorporating events into the play page, such as upcoming concerts and events. Pandora simply doesn’t offer this kind of service.

Pandora and Last.fm both have created iPhone apps that are free. Comments can be made about aesthetics and function, but Pandora easily won the battle with response time. The Last.fm app seemed to slow down quite a bit as I loaded channels but I didn’t have this problem with Pandora, which loaded almost instantly every time.

Designs will change, apps will get updated and new algorithms will be created, but in the end it’s all about the music. Both services offer great things for their users, but one consistently played tunes that I really like. Since it really is all about the music, I’m picking Pandora as the winner in this head to head battle.

Which do you prefer? Tell us in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, bns124

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Last.fm and Pandora - Music Discovery Services
Last.fm versus Pandora (Continued)
Rumor: Pandora Adding Videos?
Last.fm Partners with Warner
Podcast With Pandora Founder Tim Westergren
Pandora’s A Social Climber: Major Upgrades Look Like Last.fm, Napster
Pandora Now Free!

The Mix Tape Portable DJ Mixer may resemble a cassette tape, but you can be a boss jock with the compact mixing device for use with your iPod, iPhone or other audio device. It is both Mac and PC compatible, and features a cross-fader, dual 3.5mm stereo inputs and a headphone monitor jack. The Urban DJ, at a size of 4 x 2.5 .5-inches, is encased in plastic and needs 2AAA batteries (not included.) Get your tunes on for $30.00.

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Santa and the City 3D Christmas Screen Saver... Fly with Santa and his reindeer thru an amazingly detailed, real-time 3D city!

Features Include:

• An amazingly detailed 3D city to fly thru! With different detailed backgrounds to choose from!
• Real time 3D graphics!! There's no pre-rendered nonsense here, so you can view the action from ANY angle. It's a truly emmersive 3D experience!
• 3D sound effects! So you can hear the sleigh bells go past, and maybe even Santa himself!
• Over 50 Christmas tunes available as optional background music, guaranteed to drive your co-workers mental!
• The closest you'll get to cruising with Santa in his sleigh, spreading Christmas cheer thru the big city!

This week da Bank is bringing you a festive feast of Chrimbo treats, with a bounty of Sunday Best artists dropping by to leave their Yuletide greetings and play you their favourite Xmas tunes, and of course Rob bringing you the finest of new tunes and nascent underground artists.

You can give this podcast to someone for Christmas to put on their very own website, MySpace page or blog! Just click here and copy and paste this code :

It is interesting to note that the pop calypso (as opposed to real calypso) boom of the mid 1950s was engineered largely by a charismatic singer born in Harlem and a Julliard-trained composer from Brooklyn. Both Harry Belafonte, whose mother was from Jamaica, and Irving Burgie, who spent his childhood in a West Indies neighborhood in New York, had musical roots in the Caribbean, certainly, but their version of the islands was largely an imagined one, although imagined so well that their collaborations have actually filtered back into the folk music of the region. Intelligent, confident, and with a firm grasp of artful arrangement, Belafonte almost single-handedly brought world music into the commercial pop arena with the Burgie-composed “Day-O” song, and in Burgie he had found the perfect songwriter, a man whose compositions had the lilt and flow of ocean sunlight. Several of Burgie’s songs (and Belafonte’s versions of them) have become stone cold classics, including “Banana Boat (Day-O),” the lovely “Jamaica Farewell” (both of which were centerpieces of 1956’s million-selling Calypso album that made Belafonte an international star), and the joyful “Kingston Market.” Calypso from Jamaica contains all the tracks from that ground-breaking release plus related tracks from Belafonte’s subsequent RCA albums to make a wonderful sequence of artful, faux Caribbean folk that isn’t particularly Jamaican, although it definitely is shot through with a West Indies sensibility. The only actual folk song from the Caribbean included on the album is the gorgeous 19th Century ballad “All My Trials,” which by the 1950s had migrated to the American south and by the 1960s had become a staple of the Folk Revival. Whatever the origins, the songs collected on Calypso from Jamaica have a wonderfully summery vibe, and if most of them didn’t actually come from the Caribbean, they certainly ended up there, and many of these tunes have become mento standards. Calypso from Jamaica is the most generous single disc currently available of this phase of Belafonte’s career.