#“Some day I want to make a promo video this good - Swype 3.0”
via youtube.com
14 Jun 2011, 09:21
11 Jun 2011, 15:20
#“My Next Radio ain’t a Radio”
I did a bit of messing this week on Turntable.fm followed by Google Music on my phone and I've been doing some mulling.
Google Music has been uploading my music collection to the cloud for a week. Probably another week to go. The genius bit is that the new music player on Android then shows all of your music. If a song is not on your phone and you try to play it, it'll start streaming it. You choose if you only want to do that on Wifi or 3G too.
So this morning I drove up to collect Oisn from soccer and, as usual, had my HTC Desire paired by Bluetooth to my Lidl car stereo. Then I picked a Lou Reed song that wasn't on the phone and Google Music streamed it perfectly over 3G. Very impressed. Obviously will be rubbish in rural West Cork with the poor mobile coverage and I need to watch my data usage. But as a concept I love it.
Then you have Turntable.fm. A series of "rooms" dedicated to different types of music with a bunch of DJ slots available in each one. You can grab a slot and upload your music into your queue. The system then round-robin plays each DJs songs and those listening in the room can vote it up or down. Enough "Lames" and your song gets skipped. @walter described it as crack and he is 100% right. It is as close to a perfect game-play driven web-app as you can get. I've been in and out to the 80s rooms non-stop for days.I think my DJ name will be Transit van Driver.
I've never been much of a radio person. I'll take wall-to-wall music any day over some fools prattling-on or god-awful phone-ins. The only talk radio I ever liked was Howard Stern in SV in 1996. And that was just for laughs. But of course the problem with music radio is the lowest common denominator playlists. So I guess most of us end up listening to our own music on our own phones/ipods. But then that leads to stagnation of tastes as you are not exposed to new stuff.
Google thinks (as always) the answer is an algorithm. They have Instant Mix in Google Music. "Here are more songs like the one you arelisteningto". Yawn, last.fm sorted that out years ago.
Then Gordon Murray (@murrion) nailed it "Wonder if turntable.fm could stream to it".
Imagine the music you listen to in your car is what a bunch of different people in specific rooms on turntable.fm are playing, streamed to your phone over 3G and then to your dumb head-unit? Bluetooth based thumbs-up/thumbs-down and Room-Switcher for changing songs.
Jam in some ads or a subscription service and I've got My Next Radio.
10 Jun 2011, 09:05
#“12 Key Social Media Strategies to Grow your Turntable.fm Fan Base”
Why did you click on that link? Why? Why?
But it's only a matter of time before those posts start for real. I shall then be engaging the services of a team of snipers to deal with the infestation.
Turntable.fm - Quite seriously the first web-app to give me butterflies with excitement in a very long time. If they play this right, there is no limit to how big it can grow. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the global players aren't making offers already.
08 Jun 2011, 08:18
#“And people thought I was kidding about the spaceship.”
Rumour has it that the main entrance will be known as Heaven's Gate.
07 Jun 2011, 00:24
#“Some of the new touchpad gestures in OS X Lion”
via youtube.com
Of course you only need one button when you have gestures.
06 Jun 2011, 12:04
#“17 Years of Cork Ancestral Project - Nothing Online”
It is now seventeen years since the Cork Ancestral Project, funded by Fas, started their digitization work and none of it is on the internet.
Read @margaretjordan's piece on this. She knows the area better than anyone.
My fear about some of the current half-assed talking about Government OpenData is that we'll just have a repetition of this.
06 Jun 2011, 11:29
#“Facebook Like + Facebook Credits = Workable Micro-Payments?”
I was mulling this morning over the silly post I did yesterday on Stephen Colbert. In my ideal world, the TV show regional-licensing nonsense would go away and consumers in Europe would pay the US producers directly for each show (and vice versa for US consumers). If I want to watch Colbert right now, I want to flip 50c to the show’s owners no matter where I am in the world. Then all of those clips can happily be shown worldwide without some middle-man trying to block them.
The problem with micro-payments has always been the “how”. Without massive scale, people simply won’t sign-up to the idea. And then it struck me. What if you had a Facebook Like tied to Facebook Credits? Something along these lines:
05 Jun 2011, 20:31
#“Stephen Colbert Apologizes to all of Ireland”
I'd almost forgive them their ridiculous region-limiting of media based on this message. But not quite. Time to power-up the US VPN.
03 Jun 2011, 11:58
#“Google App Inventor Just had a Rocket Strapped to its Back!”
You can now access Web APIs. HURRAH! Finally!
OK, you won’t be able to build Twitter OAuth Apps but now anything with an open API is accessible and consumable. RSS feeds for a flippin’ start.
Watch the number of really cool apps using App Inventor go through the roof. We’re building one this evening.
03 Jun 2011, 11:46
#“Migrating Google Rich Snippets to schema.org”
If youve been using microformats or RDFa to mark up your Google Rich Snippets, sorry, you backed the wrong horse
via diveintomark.org
Shakes fist at one of his tech heroes but shouldn't be too hard to change TBH.
One question: If Google is already showing your Rich-Snippet Reviews based on hreview with stars in the SERPs, will moving to microdata markup drop you off the SERPs again and force you to re-apply yet again on their ridiculous non-web-scale Google Docs Form?
The lack of a testing tool is a wee bit shocking. Whole thing feels a bit half-baked.