Category: internet

where I discuss new technologies, “web 2.0,” and everything cool

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Fun With FineTune

I’ve been broadcasting via Live365 since 1999, as many of you know, but it’s always fun to check out new toys. FineTune invites you to choose a 45 song playslist — and they’ve got access to lots of songs in fact. It takes forever, however, to choose an entire setlist, and since I’m busy, I only picked about 12 songs and let it automatically choose the rest (basically more songs from the same artists I had already chosen. Below you’ll see how your customized setlist is embedded onto your blog.

I’d have to say this takes the participatory recommendation listening formula of Pandora a big step further. You can recommend stuff, say what you like and discover similar music that you haven’t heard before. But you can make your own mix and spread it — a bit like Last.fm but more advanced.

I still don’t understand exactly how royalties are counted for these systems — I know Live365 has a base rate that they pay and which I chip in towards as a station operator. But, like Last and Pandora, Finetune is free.

See ZDNet for more on the dev specs of finetune.

TechCrunch recently summarized the pros and cons of all the latest social music players.

Thanks to Whitney at PopCandy for the suggestion — after all, she did it first.

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Barack Obama Declares; Techies are Amped

barack obama

Obama’s statements on broadband and net neutrality are being picked up appreciatively among the digerati:

Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age. Let’s set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let’s recruit a new army of teachers, and give them better pay and more support in exchange for more accountability. Let’s make college more affordable, and let’s invest in scientific research, and let’s lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America. We can do that.

Full transcript of the speech. Streaming video.

* BoingBoing
* SlashDot

See also:

Obama’s Remarks at TEchNet 2005

Obama Podcast on Net Neutrality

Also noted, Obama’s social networking concept at My.BarackObama.com

More here.

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Yahoo! Pipes — So Cool, it’s Imploding

Yahoo! Pipes launched this week and after a glowing review from O’Reilly seems to have been knocked out by the millions (myself included) who can’t wait play [UPDATE: full recovery].

Shortly after Xeni Jardin declared Pipes “pretty badass” on BoingBoing, it went kaput. Hopefully back soon [back] — Y! Pipes (still in Beta) is a “feed aggregator and manipulator” that makes it easier and more visual to siphon specifically what you’re interested in from a variety of sources and mash it up on a viewable screen.

O’Reilly says:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.

Wow. pretty strong endorsement indeed! Read more.

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Time to Reinvent the Local Media?

It can’t be easy to be James Rainey, the L.A. Times meta/media-critic, who writes from the bunker on Spring Street. Today at USC Annenberg he said that despite the fact that the Times covers hardly any of the 88 cities in the county, the news in L.A. just doesn’t happen without the Times, as everyone, bloggers included just rip and read. Surprisingly — nobody stepped up to disagree to this demonstrably wrong sentiment.

A couple people defended mentioning LAObserved, one said a bunch of the hyperlocal blogs such as Gothamist (or LAist, to which I’m a contributor) as offering fresh and uncribbed content.

The nugget was his offbeat comment that the inside word from a Times researcher — not a scare tactic — is that in 3 years the newspaper’s profit would sink to ZERO. This cynicism from an actual staff writer on media? I guess the Internet really is killing newspapers then, or something, eh?

Rainey added that it’s regretful that the Times is pressured to appease Wall Street and therefore can only focus on short-term fixes as opposed to advanced content development and dedicated Web innovation. But this says nothing about how they blew a chance for major traffic this week when they mis-posted the Schwarzenegger audio (their Political Muscle blog was quick with the transcripts, but good luck finding the 20 or so blogs via the latimes.com homepage), or why when I check LAT on my cellphone in the middle of the night it still says USC leads UCLA at half when the game has been over for hours. Where’s the “quick fix” there?

Where’s some non-corporate skepticism from the likes of a Tim Rutten when you need it, as opposed to the extended bullhorn of the man — complacent in supposedly being the only real news source in town.

Elsewhere in broke and struggling Tribune Company news: Q4 Profits up 80% on same quarter last year. Fools. I don’t get it. Let’s take over!