last.fm

Blipster client will boost Blip.fm – great music microblogging

April 19, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’ve been a longtime fan of Blip.fm for much of my musical needs – I’ve decribed it as ‘crowd sourcing John Peel‘ because it provides a great way to discover new music, compared to Last.fm, Pandora etc, which tend to operate in practice more as players of music you already like with the very occasional new song you might enjoy.

But the biggest hindrance with Blip can be going back to the website endlessly to keep entering new songs and skipping others – particularly when I’m working. Hence why I’m not sharing as much as I used to (My profile is here).

And then I discovered Blipster, via DownloadSquad.

It’s an unofficial Adobe Air client created by Leo Lobato (also on Blip.fm and Twitter). So it works for PC and Mac, assuming you’ve got Adobe Air running – and if you’re using clients for microblogging, it’s worthwhile having the discussion with your IT department if you need to!

Blipster allows you to search, listen, add contacts etc, just as you would on the site, but without necessitating tab swapping etc.

Just the thing for helping me make more use of Blip.fm on a relaxing Sunday…

Internet discovery still amazes me…

March 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Having been active online for over a decade, I’m happy to say that I’m still pleasantly amazed by some of the things I’m able to find online.

For instance, due to the seemingly endless repeats of Scrubs on the E4 TV channel, and the fact it’s the only bearable TV show at 7pm as my son is finally going to bed, I’ve had a song from one episode stuck in my head.

I’m old enough to remember a time when that snapshot of a song would have played in my head for days, weeks or years – unless one of my real life friends happened to know what it was, or a magazine tc happened to mention it.

Image by graciepoo on Flickr (CC Licence)

Instead, a google search for ‘Scrubs, Brendan Fraser, Song’ led to to the exact tune: ‘Hold on Hope’ by Guided by Voices.

Then, thanks to Last.fm’s ‘similar artists’, I was able to listen to solo work by members of the band, and within a couple of degrees of seperation, end up at the interesting (and brilliantly-named) Psycho and the Birds side project.

Then a bit of background reading on Guided by Voices on Wikipedia (slightly more detail than Last.fm entries tend to have).

I love the internet for the things it allows me to do, not what it is.

And in a funny coincidence, my random library on Last.fm just threw up an old Lemonheads track –

After an interview in a magazine, I discovered The Lemonheads were on Taang Records, and would buy anything I found on that label without ever hearing it – leading to good stuff like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and some absolutely terrible purchases.

Having always preferred the writing/singing of Ben Deily, who left before The Lemonheads hit mainstream success, I was idly googling his name and trying to find out about what happened after he left.

I ended up finding Ben Deily‘s website, discovering his new band, Varsity Drag, realising they were on tour in Europe, asking if if was possible to interview Ben for the online magazine I was doing at the time (see a PDF of the gig review/interview here), buying a copy of the album on CD, and a CD of a previous project I’d missed, and a T-shirt from the gig.

And it’s safe to say I’m guaranteed to be at any future European gigs/buying future CDs – particularly as my other half confessed to being rather smitten with Ben after her first pop-punk gig. And all from an imported CD from 1988 (now signed), that I bought on the strength of hearing songs by an entirely different band lineup.

To close the rambling love letter to music with some sort of point:

Somewhere in there, there’s a business model for musicians/the music industry. The internet allowed me to find a musician who wouldn’t be stocked in local music stores, read his website and blog, find out tour dates, arrange an interview, publicise his music to more people, buy physical copies as much as mementoes as to play, buy a T-shirt, and sign myself up to buy future releases, T-shirts, and see gigs whenever I can.

I’ll try not to be too harsh on the LastFM Love/Twitter mashup

October 6, 2008 By Dan Thornton

The LastFM Love Tweet Twitter mashup was obviously a labour of love for Peter Weitzman, and as he says, it was born out of frustration at seeing other systems auto-generate songs being listened to by other Tweeple.

But I’d recommend not using it for two reasons.

1. Autofeeding any information is annoying. And unless you’re sharing the actual audio of songs you like, it’s pointless – which brings me to 2:

2. Blip.fm.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of last.fm and have a pretty big playlist on there. It’s generally my site of choice for listening to streaming music. But if I want to listen to Tweeple’s music, I head to Blip.fm to get an almost random selection of delights and disasters.

After all, blip.fm is like crowdsourcing John Peel. It’s fun when I’m in the mood, but stumbling across obscure German hardcore trance tends to make me run back to my own selections. And if people start bombarding Twitter with autofeeds, I can’t escape.

Does Blip.fm show a route to monetisation for Twitter?

August 25, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It took me a couple of passes to get the value of Blip.fm as opposed to existing streaming radio online like last.fm. At first, for some reason, it wasn’t running properly and playing each track in turn for me, which didn’t help! But now it’s becoming a great way to discover new music recommended by my friends, even if I normally revert to streaming my last.fm library for longer periods. The two compliment each other is the same way as someone like John Peel complimented by record collection, but I couldn’t always make it through an entire show before some obscure German techno forced me to change radio station.

Blip.fm helps me find new music by effectively allowing users to Twitter with each song they choose, giving it some context, or publicly proclaiming their love for it etc. And I can aggregate these choices into my own list, give ‘props’ to other users for good choices, and filter the overall stream via my friends, just as I would with Twitter.

Where it might give a clue to revenue streams for microblogging is in offering the direct link to buy any track as an MP3 via Amazon. So if I like a particular track or artist, the opportunity to make a quick impulse purchase is always there – and it’s backed up by allowing me to listen to the track based on recommendations by my friends.

The only weakness is that not every track is available, and I need to be aware that I want to listen to this track offline, in my car, on an Ipod, at the time that I’m experiencing it…or be able to find it easily, and at the moment there’s no way to search my Playlist, or add individual songs to my Amazon wishlist.

But if what if this model was more widely applied – to offline magazines and books for example. And to products as well? One Twitter Affiliates scheme which wasn’t tied into a sole retailer, but operated as an aggregation service to allow me to recommend almost anything, and offer a direct link?

It’s probably the quickest and simplest method of monetising the Twitterati. And people can be persuaded to link their recommendations to returns for themselves or even for charity, as something like Squidoo shows.

It would be possible to test the theory if individuals listed book recommendations etc via existing Amazon etc affiliate accounts, but this may lead to confusion and disappointment if it isn’t flagged up as such before an unsuspecting user follows the link – but Twitter and the extra 20 characters could flag referral posts quickly and uniformly.

The only question for me is who tries it first – Twitter, or an enterprising external team? Anyone know a good developer? 😉

Online collaboration isn’t always an easy option…

August 13, 2008 By Dan Thornton

There’s a tendency to look at User Generated Content and online collaboration as an easy way to create content, products and services without some of the hassles of a traditional business.

And it’s easy to understand why: No ground rent, no equipment or infrastructure costs, no limitations on who can be involved etc. And no need to necessarily pay contributors.

But it isn’t an easy option, and there are several major risks to any online collaboration which requires more than one or two people:

Trust: How quickly do you place your trust in people to deliver on their promises, to deliver them on time, and not to take good ideas elsewhere?

Management: Is there some kind of leadership or guidance to keep things moving, and to clearly articulate the vision and strategy etc – which may have been decided democratically. How do you keep momentum going and inspire people to continue even when things can be tough?

Politics: How do you deal with disagreements? Infighting? Rivalry?

Reward: How do you supply a justifiable return to contributors for their time? Financial or otherwise?

Communication: How do you keep people updated, and make things simple and easy to contribute?

Those are just the first few problems off the top of my head. The reason they come to mind is that I have basically decided to cut all responsibility for Disposable Media, leaving only the possibility of contributing the occasional blog post or article at some point.

It’s been a lot of fun, particularly when I was given the honour of being Editor, and we had a fast growth in audience – all from a group of people working for no financial reward and contributing articles, designs etc via a forum. In my time on DM, I only ever met two of my colleagues in real life in the space of two years!

But having realised that I don’t have the time and energy to drive DM forward, I stepped down to take a back seat and a more advisory role. And what then happened was quite painful to watch, as some infighting and sabotage began, communication became worse, trust was lost, and many people started drifting away. I don’t place all the blame on the Editor who replaced me, as there have definitely been people who have used a period of change for their own agenda.

Hopefully it will rise from the ashes, as over the years it’s had some very talented people, and some great articles and content. On the bright side, it’s shown me that although I was far from perfect, and made several mistakes, I did achieve a lot in keeping things going, and always trying to drive more organised and efficient systems to make life easier for everyone – and it also highlighted the need for communication and rewards, which will hopefully help me on other projects.

To be honest, the real risk to online magazines isn’t just the problems of collaboration – it’s also the arrival of new aggregated delivery services in a magazine format – i.e. systems that take your favourites from services like Last.fm, and then produce a custom magazine around them, like Idiomag. It plays on a simple philosophy of mine which is becoming more and more realistic and reinforced – ‘The most effective targeting of an individual, is the targeting they do for themselves‘