Mediaor Infrastructure Upgrades

Image by Frank Hamm via Flickr

After suffering thr0ough continued issues with Yahoo Pipes and other infrastructure pieces used in Mediaor (loosely pronounced "meteor"), I finally "reassembled" the music/technology news and views mashup. I think the new set up will be much more reliable, plus it lets me update, add and filter news sources easily and quickly.

There are some more improvements that I still would like to make to the front-end (www.mediaor.com) and the twitter bot (@mediaor) but wanted to get the backend sorted out first.

As always, if there are any other blogs or news sites that you think would make a good addition just let me know.

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Get Your Own meP3 Stream

I've been distracted lately, but figured I would let others build their own personal aggregated meP3 feed just by calling the API directly.

Basically, you just construct and RSS feed with parameters for your own user names/IDs. For example, here is mine:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=60d303c2d8c4f64cb685d4c9ecc9881e&_render=rss&hypeID=jherskowitz&ilikeID=jherskowitz&imeemID=IC4FmMqO&lastfmID=jherskowitz&pandoraID=jherskowitz&rhapID=2DF5AE86A33B862C1931C18C71D733EC

So, if for example your username on Last.fm, Hype Machine and Pandora were "fredwilson" and you didn't have any accounts at, iLike, Imeem or Rhapsody, then your feed would simply be:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=60d303c2d8c4f64cb685d4c9ecc9881e&_render=rss&hypeID=fredwilson&ilikeID=fredwilson&lastfmID=fredwilson&pandoraID=fredwilson

Note that most parameters are your username, but both Rhapsody and Imeem IDs are harder to come by. Your Rhapsody ID is found in your My Rhapsody RSS feed URLs. Your Imeem account number is even harder to find, but I'm working on trying to find a better way to get to it.

If you can then take that feed and do anything you want with it.... embed in a widget on your blog, feed it to Streampad or Yahoo Music Player, subscribe to it as a podcast, dump it into your lifestream, feed it into your Twitter account, etc.

One thing I was thinking about is playing around with "rooms" on FriendFeed to see how this would look as a collaborative "station". Other ideas? I'd love to hear them.

UPDATE: I found some issues with the way I was dealing with and rationalizing dates across all of the services. This needs more work and until it is fixed you may see stuff jumping around in time like the castaways on "Lost".

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Favorite Albums of 2008

It seems like every year I'm trying to figure out the best way to bookmark and display my favorite albums of the year. This year was no exception. To determine my favorites, I looked at a number of sources... first I created a smartlist in iTunes that just included music that was released in 2008 (and then another for 2007 to see what was "new to me" in '08 even if it was technically released last year). That information combined with some of my chart data from Last.fm and MyStrands.com helped me figure out what I listened to most. I then went and searched for each at AmazonMP3 (and eMusic for one import) and then bookmarked them using Delicious. Take the rss feed for those "bestof2008" tags and then feed them into an embeddable widget from YourMinis.

Yes, it shouldn't be this hard and I'm sure (or at least I hope) there is a much simplier way that I just happened to overlook. There were were things that *should* have worked much more easily but all seemed buggy and weren't producing the desired output. If there isn't then my resolution for 2009 will be to make sure something gets built. Anyway... enough soapboxing, here's the list. Enjoy them... I know I did.

UPDATE (1/08/2009): Here are a few of them for your listening pleasure... in their entirety.

mediaor mobile

By the way, the mediaor feed works great with a mobile feed reader (e.g. http://wap.aol.com/feeds). Check it out.

Streaming Goodness

So, I was complaining yesterday about the sync errors I was getting with my subscription music content and Windows Mobile 5.0. But, who needs to sync?! I'm continually getting good enough Edge data rates, that I'm able to stream any/all of the 2 million tracks directly to my phone. Using a smartphone RSS reader (like Newsbreak), I can subscribe to any/all of my Music Now feeds - I'm partial to my Daily Playlist - click the link and listen in all 128kbps glory. You will get forced to login to the site (which isn't formatted for display on such a small screen - but you it's not all that bad).

This combined with T-Mobile's all-you-can eat data plan has me wondering... do I even need to sync my songs? I guess when traveling somewhere out of data range (e.g. a plane), but in my normal day to day, I'm not convinced I ever need to sync. More to come...