Posts filed under: Technology
Audioscrobbler web services
As promised, Audioscrobbler has now released their web services API. The API consists of a slew of methods to slurp data out of last.fm, but nothing to add or modify content (although I’m not sure what one could really edit on last.fm anyway). It seems a bit strange to have an option to get a text file of comma separated values being returned, but I bet some people might find it easier to parse then the XML.
There are a few other strange items: For example if you go to:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/cbumelle/weeklyalbumchart.xml the ‘from’ and ‘to’ fields are identical; probably not the best range to choose. Its possible to change these by playing with the query string like so: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/cbrumelle/weeklyalbumchart.xml?from=1&to=2
This is all un-documented of course, but hey, it’s beta! What do you expect? But all in all, it looks like fun to play with. I can’t wait to see how people will remix this!
Joomla is the new Mambo
As a closure to the earlier controversy surrounding Mambo and the Mambo Foundation, a new project Joomla has been created. Although I still think they should have taken my name suggestion of “Merengue”, it’s great to see the new project off the ground and running. In particular, notice the ‘TM’ beside the Joomla logo. Lessons learned I guess…
Good luck and much success to Joomla!
PubSub site stats
I’m not sure where I’ve been, but I recently was shown the cool siteStats feature in pubsub. Apparently it’s been there for months, but I just never noticed it. Note to PubSub: more marketing! This is awesome stuff!
Micro Formats and Audio = Peanut Butter and Chocolate
Boris has an interesting post summarizing a discussion we had on micro formats and audio files. The problem is that audio found on the internet has its meta information (title, artists, album, etc..) obfuscated by the binary nature of the file. Jonathan left a comment on Boris’ post saying that it’s pretty straight forward to grab this information from the file itself. But how much easier (not to mention computationally less expensive) would it be for crawlers and bots to find audio if meta information is embedded right in the glorious page itself; no need to parse another large audio file again! I think a micro format that is a one-to-one representation of ID3 meta information will be quite useful.
I think it’s also important to point out that I’m not saying this is the only way this information should be stored and retrieved. The audio module (shameless plug) I have just released for Drupal stores all of it’s meta information in a database and will soon be query-able via a web service, but I also think it would be great if this rich meta information was available right in the XHTML.
There is some good preliminary information on the micro format wiki, and in related news Lucas Gonze has also recently been talking about a playlist micro format based on XSPF.
I think audio meta information is one of the most compelling use cases for micro formats yet, and I look forward to more discussion on this!
AJAX side effects
I’ve been busy adding some AJAX code to a new album/playlist module for Drupal. Since this is the first time I have really worked with the XMLHttpRequest stuff, I was surprised at how adding these calls actually made my code a bit cleaner. I felt like I was really able to base my code on the actions my module was going to perform, and as a bonus, I basically have a RESTful interface to my module as well! I don’t know why I never really thought about it, but someone would have to work actively to not let AJAX-ing some code open up a web service. You’ve got to like it when technology that is chosen (primarily) for user interface reasons, comes bundled with a few nice architectural bonuses.
It seems like as AJAX adoption continues, we should see a corresponding increase in RESTful web services being offered.
Bandnews: Track your favorite bands
Just got a ping from Nader Cserny about the bandnews.org site. All in all, I’m impressed. The idea is that most band websites do not push out RSS feeds (all though I’m trying to change that!), so the smart folks at bandnews.org wrote a bot to crawl band pages and publish RSS feeds for those artists’ sites. At bandnews, after creating an account, you can add a number of artists to your profile (a ‘watchlist’ of sorts), and then receive a combined RSS feed for those artists. They even have a little desktop client (windows only it seems) that pops up alerts as they come in.
I do have a few quips and suggestions though…
- With pubsub, technorati, google news alerts, RSS readers etc., it seems like a lot of this could be done with existing tools, albeit without the flair and ajax goodness of the bandnews site.
- The RSS feed that is generated is headline only, and I would find this much more useful if it contained the full article in question.
Final thoughts:
I think this is a really good start, but what I would like to see is user interaction. Bandnews is an aggregator of interesting musical content, now lets see a community (built with Drupal of course!) around it. I want to see what bands other users are watching. I want to see which other users are watching the same bands I am. I want to know what the most watched bands are. I want to see tagging for bands. Boris and myself have often talked about how cool it would be to see a ‘43bands’ (in the style of 43things and 43places). Bandnews is pretty slick the way it is, but by adding some more community features, I think bandnews could become something really great.
SXSW2006 Panel Ideas
I noticed that the deadline for submitting panel ideas to SXSW is coming up in September. Perhaps it’s just because I can’t decide whether I’m a musician who can code, or a coder who can play music, but I would love to watch (or better, participate!) in a panel that manages to span both the music and interactive technology portions of SXSW. I think it would be interesting to hear a discussion about ways musicians and artists can effectively use the Internet to build online communities and to distribute their works to these communities. The flip side would be looking at the technical challenges involved with providing ‘friendly’ tools to allow musicians to accomplish these goals. As a corollary, I think it would also be fascinating to talk about how blogging, sites like myspace.com, and technology in general is changing the way people locate and consume new music.
In my dream world, I would love to gather an articulate musician or two, some interesting technologists (and some who excel at both) and see what comes out.
If anyone is interested in trying to put something together along these lines, please contact me!
Podcasting and the post-album world
Fellow Vancouverite Tim Bray has an interesting post about podcasting and the economic impact it will have on musicians. I agree with just about everything he says. Which is good, since the same ideas he discusses form the impetus for Bryght’s new musician focused web platform.
Tim suggests a subscription based podcast service, and this is one type of revenue generating solution Bryght plans to offer to musicians. I’ve said this before, but based on my own informal surveys, I think there are many musicians out there who might want to be free from the constraints of the album. As an artist, why not just release and sell a few tracks a month, delivered straight to your fans MP3 player through Podcasts?
One could argue that the very concept of the “album” is arbitrary and is simply an artifact of our current (and physical) distribution channels. In the past, an album has been a convenient way to get music to the people. Stores stocked high selling albums, due to limited shelf space. People came and bought them. But now, we are at an interesting time. Digital distribution channels have matured to the point where they will start to influence the art that people produce and consume. Music distribution technology influencing music? That’s right, it’s a two way street!
For example, the phonograph and radio drastically influenced the music that was produced, simply by creating new markets. Would 80’s rock bands have worn as much makeup if their faces weren’t being beamed via MTV to millions of homes?
Looking ahead, I think a post-album future filled with regular releases of individual tracks will be more then simply a sea of singles, and I can’t wait to find out what takes shape.
– Update –
Richard chimes in with some good thoughts
Mambo developers stick a fork in it
It is being reported in a few different places that the core developers for Mambo have split from Miro, the commercial entity that holds the Mambo copyright and trademark. The problems stem from how Miro set up the Mambo Foundation, particularily how they failed to consult many of the main developers.
In response, it seems that the Mambo development team is going to fork the open source project and go forth on their own, which certainly puts many members of the Mambo community in a tight spot.
Most important though, is what will the new forked project be called? My vote is for Lambada, all though Meringue also has a nice ring to it.
Lessons for the Drupal community? Greed sucks, be open and transparent (especially when setting up a foundation), and play nice with others!