A couple of weeks ago we released a new IMVironment which lets you listen to music from popular mp3 blogs while you’re chatting with your friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. As you encounter tracks that you like, you can save them as a playlist in the IMV and send your “remix” to your friend over IM so they can check it out.
Music blogs have become increasingly popular over the last year both for consumers and advertisers as “Fortune 500 companies are waking up to the fact that young hipsters are congregating on MP3 blogs”.
The theory goes that, “the people who troll for music on MP3 blogs tend to be tastemakers who wield considerable influence over their peers.” Why are these kids digging on music blogs so much? Well – you’ll have to try for yourself. Check out the IMV to start exploring music blogs for yourself. When you do – you’ll encounter a pretty amazing place where “BlogJs” like Aurgasm’s Paul Irish are working to “scout out music you've never heard and deliver only the finest."
The IMV is the latest chapter of a web music story we’ve been telling all year long. It's an initial foray into making the web music discovery process a truly social experience, something that you do together with a friend. If you use YIM, you can give it a spin by clicking on the IMVironment drop down next time you’re chatting with someone and selecting the “Honda Fit” IMV. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Popularity: 30% [?]
The times they are a changing. This year the politics of fear go head to head with the audacity of hope. Democrats have come out in record numbers to vote in the presidential primaries and caucuses to date. The current Democratic front runner, Barack Obama, has inspired a new generation of young and independent voters. Both he and Hillary Clinton are promoting plans which would help create a more fair and equitable United States.
But the race between Obama and Hillary Clinton is very close. No matter what happens in Pennsylvania or any of the other remaining states, neither candidate will have clinched the nomination when all the voting is finished in June. The next presidential candidate will be determined by the remaining Democratic superdelegates.
No matter who is chosen, it will be a proud and groundbreaking moment for the United States. If a Democrat is elected, the next US president will be either a woman or a black man.
If you were a superdelegate, how would you vote? The Yahoo! Media Innovation Group has built an app called Be a Superdelegate, which runs on both Facebook and MySpace. It lets you cast your own superdelegate vote and show support for your presidential pick by putting a virtual campaign button on your Facebook or MySpace profile page. What’s especially fun about the Superdelegate app is that a vote you cast on MySpace will appear on Facebook and vice versa. Like the Texas prima-caucus, you can even vote twice – once on each network.
Earlier this month, MySpace went live with their application platform, which supports OpenSocial. Now we’re starting to see the emergence of cross platform social apps – a pretty cool development. Could it be that leading Internet companies large and small can work together and share content and data to make the Web a better place for everyone? Yes we can. Yes we can.
Be a Superdelegate today!
Hillary Obama battle by mr_magoo
Popularity: 61% [?]
William White, March 21st, 2008 on 4:34 pm
Superdelegates have enormous power in the 2008 US Presidential election. Voters have already cast millions of votes for the Democratic nominee, but neither candidate will have enough votes to win outright. It looks like a few hundred superdelegate votes will determine whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton faces off against John McCain in the US election later this year.
Be a Superdelegate is an app that runs on either Facebook or MySpace and lets you cast your own superdelegate vote. Follow the results of all superdelegate voting in real time on our interactive map and show support for your favorite candidate by displaying their badge on your profile page.
Don't let your candidate lose this all important superdelegate race! Add this app today and get your friends to vote too!
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Popularity: 66% [?]
On Monday, we went to Adobe Engage at the Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco. Billed as “Adobe's annual conversation on the future of applications and the web” – this gathering of “key thought leaders and influencers” was also a coming out party for Adobe AIR, which officially launched on the same day.
AIR allows web developers to package up existing web apps or Flash movies as full fledged desktop applications. The AIR runtime must be installed on a user's machine, but once in place – the same AIR app will run on Windows or a Mac, and a Linux implementation is due out soon.
Robert Scoble was at the front, live streaming the event from his cellphone via qik.com and his archived content provides an interesting bird's-eye view of the event. After introductory messages from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and CTO Kevin Lynch, Adobe handed things off and let several different companies share the work they’ve been doing with AIR over the past year.
We saw a variety of cool apps, but perhaps more interesting were the types of teams that have been building them. Most of the AIR apps presented at Engage came from very small teams - internal propellerheads given the freedom to experiment and play in a very small corner of their organizations, all of whom have been attracted to using Flex and AIR. Even the names of these teams were telling: Yahoo's Media Innovation and Advanced Products groups met up with participants from the “Disruptive Innovation Group” at EBay, the Research Development team at the New York Times, and the NASDAQ Research group, to name some of the teams.
Yahoo! presented 3 apps. The first was a News Minibar application which we originally developed in AS2, wrapped in AS3, and converted into an AIR application. It sits on your desktop and keeps you up to date with weather, stock prices, and newsfeeds of your choice. We also released an updated beta version of our Blog Remix app, which lets you remix different music blog posts together and export them via HTML to your blog.
Our Yahoo! Live demo included a personal shout to the audience at Engage from music artist Tilly Key via her Y! Live page. Things got interesting when people watching Tilly’s page realized they were able to enter live comments that would appear in real time in front of the audience at Engage, but by that time Live product manager Michael Quoc had moved on. He was showing some of the cool mashups that external developers have already built using the Y! Live APIs. During the Q&A session afterwards, someone commented that we had “guts to show something like this with wifi, and all the other craziness..."
In all, the Engage event provided an early peek at interesting new technology and applications in 2008. Apparently many people (and companies) seem to agree that for building innovative software, less is more. As a developer on a small team in a big company, it’s great to see platforms emerge that allow small teams to build great things, “upon the shoulders of giants.”
Adobe Engage 2008 about to begin photo by Kendall Whitehouse.
Popularity: 35% [?]
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.
Popularity: 24% [?]
William White, January 15th, 2008 on 11:38 pm
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