The last 30 days have been a revelation. After spending the past year working on web music applications in Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group, I'm starting to believe that this digital music thing is finally coming together. I can almost taste how it's going to work.
Today we're releasing a piece of very early, very experimental (possibly dodgy) alpha software -- a desktop application called Blog Remix written using Adobe AIR. Blog Remix immerses you in an active music blog experience. It merges blog posts and MP3s and lets you mix together different tracks or blog entries from your favorite MP3 blogs. Save the mix for yourself, or share it with the rest of us as an XSPF playlist, podcast, or feed (using Atom, my personal favorite syndication format, or RSS).
Until recently I was never much of a music blog reader. Don't get me wrong, I've been a big MP3 blog fan for a while. The whole independent, organic nature of the music blog space appealed to me. But really, I was in it for the music. In my mind, music blogs were like radio stations. Last year, Joseph Magnani and I built the Easylistener player, so we could easily turn any webpage into a radio station or mixtape.
The original mixtapes, those magnetic cassettes we used to know and love, had context - usually something along the lines of "Songs for Amy", "Cottage Mix" or "My Badass Supermix." In the worst-case scenario the mix would involve some Don McLean or James Taylor tunes, while you curled up in the fetal position lamenting love lost or betrayed. But a mixtape can be enjoyed on many levels even when removed from its original context.
This is what the Music Blogs application aims to do. It's like a virtual crashpad where you can pick out all kinds of great mixtapes. Every music blog has its own personality, and you get a sense of what each blog is about simply by listening to the music that's posted.
This was my line of reasoning when I developed these apps last year. But music blogs are not just mixtapes. They are so much more. As one prominent music blogger wrote to me,
"Said the Gramophone - and numerous other blogs - put so much emphasis, commitment and spirit into the writing on the site. They are not just vehicles for the transmission of MP3s… Our focus is equal parts curation (selection of songs) and writing (thinking about the songs)."
Within Yahoo!, we've been having the same conversation, with Ian Rogers, our Media 2.0 visionary leading the charge. The problem, from a developer's perspective, is that in order to empower publishers to marry content with context, music bloggers (and all publishers) must share their work in a way that a computer can understand.
As much as we'd like it to, our Facebook Music Blogs app doesn't seamlessly merge MP3 tracks with the associated blog posts because we can't get it to work consistently, in a way we can automate and scale. This is because of the variations in how music blogs syndicate (or share) their content. Some music blogs don't even provide an RSS or Atom feed!
This has become a bit of an obsession for me, and I've even set out to classify the different ways that blogs currently share content. In the process of developing the Blog Remix app, I've realized that many blogs already do this correctly.
The application comes preloaded with a set of "Popular Music Blogs." You may notice that many popular music blogs aren't on this list. By necessity, the app is populated by blogs that share their content well. This is a prerequisite for creating rich experiences that meld audio content with original context.
Check out Saidthegramophone using Blog Remix and you can almost taste the red wine they're drinking as they write. Music blogs are like the new album art and liner notes, open for anyone to interpret, reinvent, and share with the rest of us.
But it works only if music bloggers share content in a way that applications like Blog Remix can understand. We need an RSS or ATOM feed that includes media content and the entire post written within the feed. If you're feeling particularly progressive, go the extra mile and incorporate the hAudio microformat into your HTML markup.
These small steps make it possible for developers like me to create powerful new distribution channels for your blog and the artists you write about. Together, we can build the open media web. You can start right now by trying out Blog Remix for yourself and letting me know what you think.
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Comment by Matthew — January 16th, 2008 at 4:29 am
Fluxblog does have an RSS and Atom feed, they are listed in the side column of the site.
Comment by havi — January 16th, 2008 at 8:54 am
@Matthew, apologies from the editor. Thanks for reading and setting the record straight. I’ve removed the link to fluxblog.org — a music blog that does indeed provide feeds.
Comment by William+White — January 16th, 2008 at 9:13 am
@Matthew - Thanks for pointing this out. It still doesn’t help me much though because I’m not manually scouring blogs looking for these links. While you do have a link to your feed down on your page, it is not automatically discoverable. If you can add the following to HEAD section of your blog:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fluxblog" />
Then it will be easier for developers (not to mention users) to discover it! (-:
Comment by Cubik — January 16th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
WOW!
This is superb.
I will be fully behind this.
Gonna spend some time figuring out how I need to change anything over at CubikMusik.
Nice work.
Cheers
Comment by Paul Irish — January 16th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
William, this looks hot! But where’s Aurgasm?
Also I’m currently looking into getting some hAudio microformats implemented. Doesn’t look so bad.
Thanks!
Comment by William White — January 16th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
@Paul,
The content module namespace you’re using is not supported in most syndication developer kits, so I didn’t notice it when I was scanning Aurgasm before. I’ve updated the app to read it now and am happy to report that Aurgasm is working great in Blog Remix. :-) You’ll need to download it again to get the update… and you’re right, hAudio is easy to implement and will really help to properly describe the tracks that you’re blogging about. (Although the defacto [Artist - Song Name] standard you’re already using in your links is the next best thing…)
@Cubik - http://cubikmusik.typepad.com seems to work pretty well in Blog Remix too… I think you’d be better off using a DNS redirect rather than a frameset at http://cubikmusik.com/ though, so your feed can be easily discovered.
Comment by Mick O — January 17th, 2008 at 10:02 am
WW — do you see a place for tagging in this ecosystem?
The problem is that there are hundreds of music blogs that are coming and going. Navigating them effectively is tough unless you know exactly what you’re looking for in advance — or you’re free browsing and dont care what you find.
Right now it feels as if only last.fm has done a great job around media tagging, but Y! (with Delicious just sitting there) really isn’t doing much in that area. As the musoblogosphere expands, navigating it will be more of a chore. Tagging has failed in some cases, but when it’s tied to usage and leveraging a Yahoo-sized audience, it could be very powerful.
Tagging by the front-end ((like Y! Media Player and Blog Remix) seems like a good fit. Use the Delicious system. A media URL should have a corresponding song ID and Artist ID in Audio Search, so a tag on the URL is a tag on that artist/song.
Hmmm
Mick O
Comment by Fullman — January 17th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I’ve become an instant fan of this app since installing it last night and have already shared it with some of my other friends at Yahoo. At first I thought this was something Ian Rogers or Tomi might have been toying with, but nonetheless, it’s quite an awesome start to something that could become huge!
I’d definitely be open to helping you guys out if you need anything from UX to usability testing. :)
Comment by William White — January 17th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
These are great ideas Mick… I had some similar thoughts about tagging blogs one weekend a couple months ago and put together http://api.musiclibre.org/ but never ended doing much with it. Leveraging delicio.us makes lots of sense… and the y! media player and its various fractious siblings make great entry points. now if there was just some large scale web music platform in the works somewhere to implement all these great ideas…. hmmmmm
Comment by Anthony Volodkin — January 18th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
This is neat, but why isn’t it a web app? This AIR stuff seems a bit clumsy, though I do get this is an early version.
Everyone looking at music blogs should also check out Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) which is pretty much what this AIR app does minus any downloads or installs.
-Anthony
Comment by Official Tickets — February 14th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
i dont think it needs to be a web app….