Buzzsonic.com

Back in May we wrote about some useful GMail hacks, including the GMail Drive shell extension, which basically enabled you to use the allocated 2GB+ of storage space at Google as a mini hard drive, even going as far as sitting a little hard drive icon in Start>My Computer on your PC for you to drag files too.

Latest GMail hack is the G2G Exchange which basically enables GMail users to swop files that are stored on their GMail accounts. Google has a 20mb email limit so bigger files have to compressed or split as multiple files. G2G apparently will recognize these files and display them as one complete file.

More GMail Hacks

Roam Drive (Roamdrive.com)
Ten Cool Gmail Hacks (Makezine.com)
GMail Tools and Plugins (Igniq.com)
gDisk (Sourceforge.net)

The brilliant Green Day mash-up album we mentioned a few days ago has already had the plugged pulled by Warner Bros music officials apparently.

You can follow the subject at mashers hang out Get Your Bootleg On. Naturally the old download link is now dead but there’s a growing groundswell of support for the project just as there was for the famed (and similarily outlawed) DJ Dangermouse mashup, ‘The Grey Album’. You can, as of this minute grab the album here and read up further on the planned music activism set for December 13th.

Elsewhere this week we’ve stumbled across a Madonna mash-up project (‘the Immaculate Concoction’), one from Radiohead and a 50 Cent/Queen ‘co-lab’. Of course the artists themselves are blissfully unaware of all the DiY remix activity going on.

Related Links

Dean Grey Tuesday (Alt.fm)
RIAA Targets Mash-Ups (BoingBoing.com)
Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash up of Music and Politics (FirstTuesday.org)
Raiding The 20th Century, the History of the Cut-up (Musicalbear.com)
The Grey Album by DJ Dangermouse (BannedMusic.org)

Here’s another useful little service. An online generator that allows you to convert any RSS feed into a PDF, called, not unsurprisingly RSS2PDF. Useful if you’re wanting to print out stuff I guess.

Here’s how the Buzzsonic RSS feed looks like using RSS2PDF

There is such an avalanche of information on RSS, RSS software and RSS feeds nowadays it is simply bewildering, even to someone as relatively ‘informed’ as me. What I do know is, apart from a hiatus this summer I was trying to wade through literally 100s of different feeds a day, each with multiple headlines.

Imagine trying to visit each individual website daily and pulling out all the new headlines manually. RSS delivery shaves hours off any news hounds day. I’ve been using the free aggregator RSS Bandit for a few months now but noticed as my feed list grew to a more sizeable proportion, when RSS Bandit updated the headlines the thing rendered my two year old laptop almost useless, grabbing almost 100% of system resources as it updated.

The solution was a lovely little Firefox plug-in called Sage. The tiny little app sits on your browser toolbar and kind of acts similar to recalling your history function or your favourites, opening up a column to the left in Firefox. Another big headache for me was that all the feed URLs I’d built up in RSS Bandit would have taken hours for me to manually type back into Sage. No worries.. I simply exported my collected feeds (as an OPML file) in RSS Bandit and then imported them back into Sage. Excellent!

I’m finding that Sage is extremely nimble, especially in terms of resource useage and feed updates. Still, if I’m away from my own PC I’m still stuck. Well not really, there’s been a number of web based RSS readers for a while now but the one I’m using right now is the Google Reader. Like most things from Google its functional and simple to use. Again, I simply imported all my feeds via the OPML file and bingo, access to all of my essential feeds from any computer anywhere.

Related Links

RSS Background
All About RSS (FaganFinder.com)
About Feed Syndication (Feedburner.com)
OPML (Wikipedia.org)
RSS (Wikipedia.org)
Choosing an RSS Reader (SearchEngineWatch.com)
What is RSS and Why Should You Care? (SearchEngineWatch.com)

Finding RSS Feeds
BlogPulse
Daypop
Technorati
Pubsub
Yahoo RSS

Free RSS Readers
RSS Bandit
Feedreader
RSS Reader
Pluck
Rocket RSS Reader
List of News Aggregators (Wikipedia.org)

Web Based RSS Readers
Bloglines
Findory
Google Reader
Newsgator
NewsIsFree

We started writing about Podcasting over six months ago when it was still a niche buzzword. Since our last post on the subject there has been an incredible explosion in the fledgeling web broadcast medium.

You cant look at the interweb nowadays without stumbling across the words, Podcast, Podcasters, Podcasting or iPodders and the like. Least of all, easily the biggest boost for Podcasting this year came in June when Apple added support for Podcasting with the release iTunes 4.9 (the software is now up to version 6.)

Even since we last wrote on the subject back in May, there’s been a great amount of new and improved and streamlined resources for you to get involved, broadcast yourself, listen or just learn what all the fuss is about. What we decided to do here was get up to date and trawl around for the best sources of information, links and resources, wether you simply want to put your own podcast together, or just subscribe to some shows and listen for yourself.

Some Podcasting Background

Podcasting (Wikipedia)
How Podcasting Works (HowStuffWorks.com)
iPodder:A Brief History (iPodder.org)

Creating Your Own Podcast

Podblaze.com (Podcasting Resources)
Wave Pad (Free Audio Editing Software)
Audacity (Free Audio Editor and Recorder)
Liberated Syndication (Libsyn.com)
RSS Radio (Podcasting client)
Juice (Podcasting receiver)

Podcasting Directories, Shows & Resources

Odeo
Podcasting News
iPodder
Podsafe Music Network (Podshow.com)
Christian Podcasting (Christian Podcasts)
Dailysonic (MP3 Zine)
Podcast Alley (Podcastalley.com)
Podomatic (Podcast software & directory)
The Podcast Network
Podfeeder
Vital Podcasts
Podspider (Podcast Search)
Podcast Pickle (Podcast community)
Podnova
Gigadial
Yahoo Podcasts

We’re big fans of well done mash-ups here at Buzzsonic and one of the better done bootleg DJ mash-ups (or, unofficial remix/bastard pop to give it two of its many names) in the last eighteen months has easily been San Francisco DJ Party Bens ‘remodel’ of Green Days ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ (as Boulevard of Broken Songs) which seemlessly mixes up Green Day and Oasis and throws in a bit of Travis for good measure. There’s even a companion video mashup of the audio mashup here.

Now Australian mashers Team 9 have taken on the whole of Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ album with great effect.

‘American Edit’ grabs the album, shakes out all the crap bits and sprinkles the whole project liberally with cheeky samples from the likes of Johnny Cash, Queen, the KLF and Ashanti, amongst plenty more. Wholely applauded at the ‘bootleg barometer’ GYBO.
Stand out track for us is ‘Novacaine Rhapsody’ a brilliant mixup of ‘Give Me Novacaine’ and Queens ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, pure brilliance. Grab the album while you can here.

Get Your Mash On….

Get Your Bootleg On (GYBO)
NWA As Remixed Illegal Art (Buzzsonic)
Primal Scream Get The Mash-up Treatment (Buzzsonic)
Beatmixed (Beatmixed.com)