Radio @AmbientSignal

I've been publishing my meP3 stream out to a bunch of different platforms (e.g. FriendFeed, Tumblr, Soup.io) but the one that I'm most fond of right now is the Twitter station that I'm passively programming @ambientsignal. There are actually many parts of the experience that are substantially worse on Twitter than on the other platform - most notably the lack of an integrated media player - but you've got to go where the people are, right?! A quick addition (and hopefully future evolution) of playTwitter and StreamPad (shoutouts to both Lucas Gonze and Dan Kantor) could make this even more powerful.

While I was originally focused on constructing a station by crawling a single user's social graph, I've shifted focus a bit more to the simple aggregation of a users *own* stream. Each user can publish their own, then just simply follow the others they want. Where I think it could get really interesting is in Twitter clients. Each user could create their own "group stations" comprised of any single or collection of meP3 streams. Then just throw a small media player into those Air and iPhone apps and you've got a social listening and discovery service that I think would be as compelling as any out there. TweetDeck, Twirl, Twitterific, et al... are you out there? Not only does it power great content discovery (I've personally been exposed to at least 5 new bands that I like in as many days from @friendP3), but it would/will stimulate endless water cooler conversations around the content.

My friend Dave now is also powering his own Twitter station @ZprocketRadio. It's just starting to load up with tracks, but when I hear something I like I will inevitably reply to @ZprocketRadio with a 140 character note on what I think about it. He also has brought up some interesting ideas around the use of #hastags to power collaborative playlists that I may play around with today.

If anyone out there is interested in being one of the first stations (or wants to build a killer Twitter Radio client) drop me a line at jherskowitz (at) globallistic (dot) com and I'll help you out. It's still super-hacky and exceedingly geeky... but I'd be interested to see if a community evolves around this concept.

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More meP3s

My experiments involving the social graph, aggregation, data portability and MP3 search continue. I've now got my Imeem just played feed automatically producing MP3 search results as well. Unfortunately, I don't yet see a way to easily get your Imeem UserID from your username/login info... so it's not really user friendly for anyone else at all at this point since I had to manually dig mine out and hard code it. Regardless, I've added it to my lifestream and it seems to be working as well as the others.

Unfortunately, Soup.io (my current publishing platform) nor Tumblr seem to be able/want to keep up with the feeds. That being said, I'm also pushing my aggregated MP3 stream to some other lifestreaming services that seem better equipped to keep up. FriendFeed feed seems to deal with it pretty well (http://www.friendfeed.com/jherskowitz). And while Lifestream.fm (http://lifestream.fm/jherskowitz) won't embed a flash player in the stream automatically like FriendFeed and others, it does have a cool feature (powered by Beam-It-Up-Scotty) that lets you send links via SMS to anything in your or others' lifestream(s). So if you see a song you like, you just "beam it" to your phone, click on the link, and listen to the track stream over the air. Pretty cool.

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me*dia*or: Finally Gets Some Fixes

The relaunch of Tumblr finally forced me to clean up me*dia*or and I think it should be much more user-friendly now. Before I had just been using Tumblr to aggregate all of the "music 2.0" feeds that I pull (almost 100 now I think) - which is not really it's primary purpose, but it worked. Then a few months ago I reimplemented the me*dia*or tumblelog as more of it's own social network built upon Ning. Then I started using Yahoo Pipes to pull, filter and aggregate some more sources that covered a wider range of subjects (but I only wanted the music related ones). I then had a number of different uber-feeds and depending on which one you subscribed to, you got slightly different behaviors. Worst of all if you subscribed to the me*dia*or feed and clicked on a link, it took you to the same synopsis of that feed on my Tumblr site where you'd have to click again to get the full/original story. Yeah, a total frankenstein.

Tumblr's new build (launched last week) has some nice additions, but they have now implemented some new rules that limit users ability to use it in the manner I was. First of all, they have removed all the source attribution links. I had been asking the Tumblr folks if there was a way to make the sources *more* prominent (e.g. in the Title of each story) - but unfortunately they went the other way. I'm not sure if it is just a bug - but I have a feeling this is tied to the second TOS change they implemented... you are now only allowed to aggregate up to 5 RSS feeds into Tumblr (slightly less than the 100 I was using it for) and they state that any/all feeds you aggregate must be your own original content. OK, OK, I've got it.... you don't want me using your service the way I was. :-)

So, I went back and built a massive RSS feed splicer, filter, renamer thingamajig using Yahoo Pipes (which *is* exactly what it was meant for). I took the resulting Pipe feed and ran it through feedburner, then took that feed and sucked it back into my Ning site. Clear as mud?!

To make a short story long, all it means is that when you subscribe to the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mediaor) you will now get nice clean links (with attribution in the title) that takes you directly to the source of the story - no need to make a superfluous stop on my site. If you want the more full experience - with community, jobs, photos, etc then you can still get it all at www.mediaor.com.

Any comments, suggestions, ideas? Just let me know. Hope you enjoy the new and improved me*dia*or.

me*dia*or shower

Between vacation last week, and some work I've been doing on on me*dia*or - I haven't posted much lately. But, I think me*dia*or is getting pretty good. Well, at least *I* find it useful for keeping up with the news and dialog around "music 2.0".

I've turned what was once just a simple feed splicer into a full blown "river of news" feed aggregation network. I'm pulling about six dozen feeds right now - and using Yahoo Pipes to filter some of the feeds to just give me the music/media related posts from some of the more broad sources (e.g. Fred Wilson, TechCrunch, Mashable, etc.).

I've added a custom Google search box (that will search all of me*dia*or's sources), digital music job postings culled from Indeed, an embedded Meebo chat room (with the hope it will spawn real-time dialog among readers) and a Streampad widget that pulls the day's most popular MP3s from The Hype Machine (so you can listen while you read).

There are forums for quick access to on going discussions on particular topics. A secondary flash audio player where users can upload and/or point to MP3s across the web. The photo widget allows members to pull their Flickr photos directly into the network. Ning (one of the platforms used for me*dia*or - with Tumblr being the other) enables direct integration of those players and slideshows back into Facebook.

On my personal me*dia*or profile page, I've pulled in the feed from this blog as well as my Facebook status and Last.fm quilt.

Now the real question... will anyone besides me actually use it?

mediaor as a social network?

So, I was digging back into Ning tonight and wanted to see what I could do to turn my read-only Music 2.0 aggegrator into more of a destination using Ning's social network-in-a-box offering. I threw this together in about 20 minutes. I'd be interested in what you guys think.... is the social network angle more or less interesting than the "river of news" angle (built on Tumblr)?

mediaor - a music/tech feed aggregator

About a month ago I threw out the idea of establishing a single destination with multiple bloggers that cover this "music 2.0" space... a sort of laser-focused Techcrunch. I had a few people ping me and say they were interested in contributing, but then I got busy and never got around to doing anything about it.

So, in response to my laziness on the topic, I took an easier approach.... a "river of news" style feed aggregator of music/technology focused sites that I regularly read (inclusive of this one).

www.mediaor.com

In my daily routine, I use Pakeflakes as my start page and have all of these feeds (and many more) laid out as modules on the page. The problem is, some people post a lot, and others very little. This "river" allows me to quickly scan the latest and greatest without having to filter through them all individually.

I quickly pulled this together in about an hour with Tumblr (free) and a domain name I scooped up tonight through GoDaddy ($9/year).

Based on the rules of each blogger/publishers feeds, you will notice that some stories will post in full while others only provide a snippet. In either case, attribution and backlinks are always provided. Also, if you want to comment on any post you need to do that at the origin blog.

I'd be interested in what people think. Is this useful? Are there others blogs you want to see "thrown in the river"? Just let me know....