Uncovery Revisited

A while ago I messed around with the idea of a Twitter bot that, using hashtags, would rebroadcast anything that someone thought that others should know about (e.g. "check out this band they are great"). The idea wasn't that these recommendations were directed at anyone in particular, but instead played upon the human nature of people wanting to tell other people about something they think is great (see latest buzz on Susan Boyle video from Britain's Got Talent).

I only took that original project so far, but today I revisited it briefly and made some tweaks (influenced by the existing Twitter bot @new_music).

Basically, it looks at Metacritic's movie feed, scrapes the scores off the pages (since they aren't in the feed itself) and filters the results to only display the stuff that has an aggregate metascore of 65 or greater. When it finds one of those, it then hits YouTube to pull the trailer for the video. From there it shortens the URL and then tweets the results out at @uncovery.

I may also start to splice in music, DVDs and other content too... but will let this run a while to see how it feels. As always, comments and thoughts welcome.

UPDATE: I also have spliced in Rotten Tomatoes feed too.

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RealPlayer 11 + Mac = No WiFi

Image via WikipediaI have been having major connectivity issues on my MacBook for the past week. Dropping the connection, pages not loading, streaming media stuttering. I spent days searching Google to find out what the issue could be and tried everything - deleting preference files, clearing my PRAM, rebooting, reconfiging my Airport, reboot, reboot, reboot.... all with no luck. There are tons of forums that have lots of theories as to what is causing it (and lots of people yelling at Apple to fix the problem).

In my case, it was something simple. RealPlayer 11 was the cause. Presumably something to do with the "stream catching" feature. Granted, it is a cool feature that will let you rip YouTube videos, songs from Pandora, and more... but the damn thing my computer virtually unusable for 3 days. I dragged the app to my trashcan and all my issues were resolved instantly (didn't even need to reboot).

I'm not sure if there was a setting or config in RealPlayer 11 that could have been switched to remedy the problem, but if you are having similar problems you may want to see if this is the culprit.

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• Realplayer 11 Plus v11.0.4 build 6.0.14.806

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Great video highlighting the massive gap between *real* consumers and the rest of us....

The Greatest Coldplay Video Ever?

What on earth is going on here?! Coldplay playing live on a morning show as a musical backdrop to octogenarian Dancing with the Stars?!


See the video at The Frames Channel on MyStrandsTV

Facebook Shining the Spotlight on Free Range MP3s

If you are on Facebook you know that music applications are by far some of the most popular 3rd party apps across the network. The poster child for this is iLike who have basically doubled their membership base within the span of about a week after they rolled out their FB app. Also, Numair Faraz's "Audio" application currently can be found on over a half million profiles. The application is little more than a flash player that you give an MP3 url. As more people find and add URLs to free-range MP3s, the larger the index becomes so that others don't have to forage so hard.... you can stumble across a song that someone else has already found and just add it to your profile. There has been no exchange of media assets, just a bookmark. In one recent conversation John Parres captured the issue very succinctly...

I'm not hosting it. Numair's not hosting it. And Facebook is not hosting it. Butgo ahead and click the play button. It will point you to the MP3 file right over.... THERE>

Am I breaking any laws by publishing a search result? Are Numair and the Facebookers breaking any laws collaborating to build an index of publicly knowable URLs?

I, of course, am no lawyer - and don't have a clue whether/how the recording industry will look to stem this tide. But what I do know is that there is a huge trend of new services going this route... Streampad, grabb.it, Project Playlist, Webjay (although Yahoo will shut down this month), MP3Realm. Hell, I can just as easily use Google to find "free-range MP3s", build a XSPF playlist and drop a flash player into my blog. Unlike imeem and others that host the files, these (to your point) are just a bunch of pointers to locations all over the web.

If this approach gets locked down, then others will pop up. It would be just as easy (if not easier) to create an audio experience out of the freely available (and often times licensed) music videos on YouTube and others. Personally, I am not a music video watcher, but I would gladly leverage the audio track from them to build a free, legal (?), personalized playlist (or is it a station?). Who is liable then?

The damn has more leaks than the industry has fingers. Time to stop wasting time trying to plug the holes - and instead spend that energy on developing ways to leverage the power of the current.

Is Google Universal Search the Ultimate Music Mashup?

There has been a bunch of talk this past week about Google's new Universal Search. Basically, it returns search results from all of their previously disparate search products and integrates them into a single set of results.

While this seems like a natural progression, it got me thinking about the various music search/mashups that I have recently talked about - FoxyTunes Planet, PluggedIn, and others - and how Google is taking their approach but supersetting them with the pure breadth of coverage.

Just think about all of Google's search products (web, image, book, blog, groups, news, finance, local, etc.) and how powerful that could be when built on top of a music/artist search experience. Then fold in their other properties of YouTube, Google Groups, Google Talk (with their scrobbler-esque Music Trends data aggregation), Blogger, Google Maps and their other products. Now feed in their massive audience and reach, and AdSense/AdWords products. Wow. The one piece that they don't surface (that they should) is MP3 search. It never really struck me that they don't surface media files in their results, but it's obvious that they could easily do so if they wanted to. So, I did a little research and found that indeed, it is easy...

Google: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3

Using this string we are using the "index of" and the inurl commands to attempt to isolate directories only. The mp3 tag on the end tells google to look for mp3s in these open directories. You can change this to wma or ogg if you wish.

You can add additional search criteria to focus your search more.

Google: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "pearl jam"

This command will find open directories with mp3 files with Pearl Jam. Obviously you can change the band name or file type to better define your search.

It is quickly becomes apparent Google could instantly ten-up the rest of the music-specific search/aggregation sites...if they wanted it to. I have no insight if they do or don't... it seems like they have been very careful around the copyright issues in the past but maybe with the YouTube acquisition they are getting a little less risk-averse?

Earlier in the year I suggested that Google should buy Last.fm. Maybe they are just going to build it instead?

Music Mashups as a Business

I love music 2.0 mashups... I've written about a bunch. Most started with someone just pulling together a couple of sources of information to solve a specific personal need. The next logical step? Turn it into a business.

I've been lucky enough to see a handful of new ones that have yet to launch (and some that have). Some are move evolved than others... but the basic concept is the same. Build a music destination without actually having any content themselves. YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm... these companies get the users to provide the content (and/or usage data). Then these tertiary aggregators suck in all the content via open APIs, stitch them together, scatter some ads around the dynamically created pages, and voila... instant business. Most of the companies that are doing this now are small startups. Some haven't even launched, but are in acquisition talks with major media companies.

What a great business model. The fact that they are leveraging freely available/syndicatable content to fulfill an music consumption experience is smart. No licensing costs to them - no legal liability for the "gray" content that they surface. Of course, the labels are going to figure this out and start to try and figure out how to get a piece of the action.

Web 2.0... The Machine is Us/ing Us

This video was making the rounds early this week, and I thought it was great. Creative, informative, entertaining... it is one of the things that makes YouTube so powerful.

Last.tv - the YouTube/Last.fm Mashup

I love this concept (although I'm not much of a music video watcher) - it is a mashup of YouTube and Last.fm. Basically, it builds your own personal music video channel based on artists you like (pulled from your Last.fm profile). Others have done similar things by bouncing your Now Playing information up against the YouTube library to find videos from that artist - but this is more of a continuous experience. It will string together a continuous playlist of music videos from artists you have listened to before (or your musical "neighbors" have listened to).


last.tv