The folks over at the Hype Machine have created a 2008 music zeitgeist that can best be described as a loving work of information wizardry. To the curious and musically-inclined, it’s an incredible resource for mining the past year’s trends in popular music. To followers of the blogosphere, the Hype Machine’s offering is unique because all of the content is derived from the social web: the rankings were based on individual bloggers’ year-end top lists, the reviews were written by thousands of independent music fans, and the artist photos were shot by a horde of different flickr users.
