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Yahoo! Developer Network evangelist Jeremy Zawodny spoke with Paul Donnelly from the Pipes team about the new Pipes badges that launched today. A badge is a simple way to display the output of your favorite Yahoo! Pipe on your website or blog.

There are three types of Pipes badges you can add like widgets to your webpage or blog: the map badge, when there's geocoded data; an image badge that includes slideshow functionality; and a list badge, for all other valid data. Help us spot the first generation of creative Pipes badges out in the wild, by posting your badge sightings and URLs in comments here. Read more about this release or watch this video introduction:

Popularity: 71% [?]

We just released the Easylistener web music player. You can use it to easily share web music you love on your blog or favorite social network page. We’ve even built this cool embed code generator so you can configure it however you want -- easily.

You’re probably thinking – big deal, there’s already a ton of cool radio player widgets (last.fm, finetune, MOG, Sonific, RBG, etc.) on the web these days. Everyone I know and their brother’s girlfriend’s cousin has released some form of music-player widget to promote a particular media service or offering.

Easylistener is different. It's not about promoting a particular product or service. It’s about embracing a new ideology – one of free-flowing music and ideas, shared via the web by real people who love music.

What can Easylistener do? For starters, it supports virtually any web page as a potential music source. You can point it at a music blog like Scissorkick, or a playlist document like XSPF, M3U or ASX. You can even give it a RSS or ATOM feed and it will play any mp3 links it finds in the feed. This lets you to do some pretty cool stuff like use Pipes to create a RSS feed of recently listened to tracks from last.fm that are also on Hype Machine and then play them back using Easylistener. Wow!

Easylistener makes it easy to play any page on the web with mp3 links in it. But this has nothing to do with “stealing" music or even listening to it for free. Music from artists that inspire and captivate you is always worth paying for. You should go to their shows, pick up a t-shirt, and buy their music. But these days we are virtually drowning in musical choice. Music is ubiquitous -- it surrounds us everywhere, so much so that paradoxically it becomes hard to find. Easylistener is about promoting artists and making it easy for you to share their music so the rest of us can discover new music.

It's also about empowering people to share their own work. I'm not a great musician, but I do love making music. My friends and I get together and jam, and then there’s all that music I played in college. How easy is it to share my own music now? Well, I had to upload the mp3s, and then I had to point Easylistener to them. Damn, that was pretty easy.

Of course, all this web music goodness didn’t come out of nowhere. I remember playing with the desktop media platform Songbird earlier this year and thinking, "Wow, this thing is awesome. What if something like this could run in a web browser and be shared like a widget--almost like a Songbird for the web." I wanted that and I was lucky enough to get a chance to build it.

Songbird is an amazing product and was definitely a huge inspiration for Joe Magnani and I as we developed Easylistener in the Yahoo! Media Innovation Group. Then, of course, we should also acknowledge the influence of the OG player XSPF Web Music Player by Fabricio Zuardi. Fabricio's app is a classic, so it's not surprising we modeled some core features off it. Respect.

Finally, I should mention Yahoo!’s chief playlisting scientist Lucas Gonze, whose visionary ideas got me thinking about this stuff in the first place. I had the pleasure of working with Lucas to help port his amazing Playthispage service from Webjay to Yahoo!. I can’t tell you how psyched I am about the new stuff his team has been working on and what’s coming up next from Yahoo! Music.

But don’t take my word for it -- try Easylistener for yourself. Join the growing number of sites like My Old Kentucky Blog, Swedelife, songs:illinois, and Indie Music Filter already using it. Put Easylistener on your MySpace, blog, or personal website today and tell us what you think.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Video by Ricky Montalvo, Yahoo! Developer Network

When Chad Dickerson asked me to create a video for Pipes, I assumed we'd be doing a tech talk or an Experts @ Work episode with Jeremy Zawodny as host. Instead, Chad wanted to involve the entire Pipes team rather than the product itself. It was a chance to go “behind-the-scenes.”

I sat down with Jonathan Trevor who leads the Pipes team. I was looking for ideas. "Well, I think it would be cool to somehow incorporate these funky twisted pipes in the parking structure here at the Yahoo! campus," Jonathan suggested, "they remind me of the Internet." Right there, I knew I had my intro. We scheduled a day to shoot.

Since I wanted the video to have a raw look and feel, I decided not to scout these pipes until the day we shot. This breaks one of the most important rules a digital filmmaker should follow: Location scouting. But I liked the challenge -- it forced me to achieve a creative shot that doesn't look overly produced. The result was an informal opening, with Jonathan chatting about the pipes that were misaligned when the Yahoo! garage was built.

Next, I wanted the video to have a feel to it, a tonality that would be visually rich while making the topic itself creatively interesting. Since we weren't going to dive into the technical aspects of Pipes, I wanted the video to appeal to a broader audience. I focused on the people behind Pipes. To help set the mood, I selected music by Scott Hansen from Tycho Music.

I still had to to interview the rest of the team. This posed another challenge: Where do I shoot so it doesn't look too corporate? In a landscape of uniform cubes and computers, I tried to frame each of the team members differently and in different locations. I opted for a wide screen format so that I could focus on the individuals as they spoke, but still give a glimpse of their work surroundings.

I describe this as a "pocket documentary" -- entertaining short-form programming in a documentary-style format, with creative cutting and pacing.

Popularity: 7% [?]