Thursday, May 28, 2009

Weekly Top Songs MP3 Playlist

I just extended my Playtapus Project to create MP3 playlists out of a users Weekly Top Songs chart from Last.fm. I have embedded the list into the sidebar of this page, and then let Streampad handle the playback of them (at the bottom of the page).

To get your your own MP3 playlist for Weekly Top Songs, go here: http://tr.im/mIkv then get as RSS.

Check it out, and let me know what you think...

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Mediaor Infrastructure Upgrades

Yahoo Pipes (2/3)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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Sunday, May 03, 2009

Latest Experiment - Blip.fm Recommender Bot

Image representing Blip as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase

For heavy Twitter users, we are all seeing the communication platform being used more and more heavily as a viral music/taste distribution tool. In my last post, I showed the traffic numbers of some of the more popular music services. One of the fastest growing at the moment is Blip.fm. That information served as the inspiration of my latest mashup... I wanted to create an easy way to request recommendations to be pushed back to me based on a song that I "blipped".

So, a rainy weekend later I present to you the basic concept. Here's how it works.

  • just add the tag #recsplease to any "blip" (that gets published to Twitter)
  • the mashup monitors Twitter for blips that have the tag/recommendation request
  • from the Blip.fm URL I go and fetch/scrape the artist name for the song that was shared
  • this "seed" artist is then used to generate an array of similar artists
  • it constructs a tweet and replies to the requester with the list of recommendations


The next piece will be to link those recommendations off to a playlist, mix or radio station that includes those recommendations (in addition to trying to optimize the whole thing to be better, strong, faster). Maybe later this week. As always, let me know if you have any suggestions.



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