Peter Gabriel, one of my all-time favourite musicians, continues to be at the forefront of technology usage — particularly when it comes to technology for music and human rights:

• Back in 1993 he launched Xplora, the first music and multimedia CD-ROM created by a musician
• In 1999 he helped set up OD2, which was one of the first online music download services (and is now owned by Nokia)
• This year he is MIDEM’s 2008 Personality of the Year (more on PG & MIDEM from Reuters)

On the human rights side:

• In 1992 he co-founded WITNESS, “an international human rights organization that uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations”
• In 1999 he started TheElders.org, which is a “new gathering of world leaders who [have] come together to guide and support our ‘global village’”.

So it’s no surprise that he is involved in recent areas of music technology as well:

• First there’s we7, which is a free, ad-supported music download community
• Then there’s TheFilter.com, which is a music, video, literature, and news discovery service (more in this CNET article by Greg Sandoval)

Both sound really interesting and I’ll write more about them once I’ve played around with them a little more.

[More PG: Wikipedia, Last.fm, Real World Records, WOMAD]