John Cook, long time author of the popular Venture Blog at the PI, is moving on to the Puget Sound Business Journal and launching a new blog. John’s a good guy, I’m including a copy of his announcement to below.

After more than a decade of covering Seattle area startups, I’ve decided to roll the dice on a new venture myself.

My long-time colleague Todd Bishop and I are joining forces with the Puget Sound Business Journal to create a new online news site.

Our goal is quite simple: to create the leading technology news source in the Pacific Northwest.

I will continue to write my blog on the new site, covering startups, entrepreneurs and venture capital. But the coverage will go much deeper, with Todd offering his award-winning reporting on Microsoft and other large technology companies. I am also happy to announce that Eric Engleman — a veteran technology reporter at the Puget Sound Business Journal who many of you already know — also will be contributing to the site.

Over time, we plan to add new editorial features as well as host events around town.

While it is tough to say goodbye to the P-I, it also was the right time for me to take the entrepreneurial plunge. (Hanging around so many entrepreneurs over the years is a bit contagious.)

I recognize that startups are hard and that most new ventures fail. But I am energized by the opportunity to combine traditional journalism with the world of new media.

Anyway, we are working on the new site and plan to launch in the coming weeks. You can sign up at the temporary site — www.pugetsoundbusinessjournal.com/tech — to get notified of the launch and reserve a spot for daily e-mail news updates once we go live.

In the meantime, you can reach me at 206-913-7926 or johnharoldcook@gmail.com.

Thanks for all your support over the years. Of course, none of this would be possible without you, the readers. So I welcome any feedback, insight or questions you might have as we try to build this new journalistic venture.

We are firm believers that a technology center of Seattle’s stature deserves a truly local news source. So please don’t hesitate to email or call if you have story ideas, Web site features or other elements you would like to see in the site.

iLike’s new developer platform allows you easily add full-track streaming music to any web site without difficult engineering. (See coverage on TechCrunch and CNet.)

You don’t have to upload any tracks, the music comes from major labels, and it’s all legal.

there’s an interesting twist to iLike’s platform: it’s specifically focused on making iLike playlists available and openly collaborative. That’s evident in the list of launch partners: the forthcoming Connected Weddings application on Facebook, for example, will let wedding guests add to a suggested song playlist; the Flixster movies application will use iLike’s API to let members build movie soundtracks to accompany the film’s page in the Flixster directory; the set of TV-fan apps built by Watercooler will let fans also construct the soundtrack that played in the background in any episode of a given TV show. Other partners include Classtop.com, the Social Gaming Network’s Free Gifts application, Slide’s FunSpace, Jambool, Mesmo.com, and Zimride’s Carpools application.

The partners don’t end with social applications, either: IAC’s Evite will be using iLike’s API for a “playlist” tab on each invitation, so that guests can build a party soundtrack, and both TypePad and Google have built embeddable blog widgets to incorporate music.