I'm actually in the process of learning Ruby right now. I'm curious though. From the perspective of someone who has hasn't been programming for a long time, would you consider it a good idea to learn Ruby before learning Rails? I'm waiting on my copy of The Well-Grounded Rubyist to arrive so I can get started.
The FCC keeps information on radio stations, but it doesn't include anything on the station's genre. This could probably be fixed with a classifier that learns based on the station's website.
I've never heard of Shoutcast, I'll have to check it out.
EDIT: SHOUTcast's API doesn't seem to support anything that would allow a show host to gather info on users. That's probably for the best though ..