Buzzsonic.com

Here’s a clever idea. Marketing and design specialists Ralston 360 have come up with a great angle to market their services, a streaming video that explains all the basics of Podcasting all wrapped up in a ‘virtual ipod’.

There’s also a free 14 page whitepaper, ‘Podcasting-the Pod Has Landed’ (in PDF format) on the website (in exchange for your email, natch!) which explains a bit more. They also have another free download, ‘To Blog or Not to Blog’ which kind of speaks for itself but is worth a look for newbies if you’re thinking of starting your own.

Thanks to Steve Rubel at the Micro Persuasion blog for the lead.

Related Reading

The Buzzsonic Podcasting Round-up (Buzzsonic.com)

Its been a good few months since Buzzsonic heard anything of note on the yet to be fully operational Snocap, the legal P2P download service founded by (original) Napster founder Shaun Fanning. Music blogs Hypebot and Coolfer were the first people this week to spot that a new Snocap technology was being used by new (to us) band the Format, selling tracks via their MySpace profile using the Snocap service Linx.

The Format tracks are available as MP3’s at 79c each and use Paypal as the merchant for payment, though Snocap Linx works with MP3 as well as content encrypted with WMA DRM according to the Snocap website. Bands can cut and paste the Linx code into their MySpace profiles (or any website for that matter) much like other online services like YouTube, Slide and Photobucket and are offering code to MySpace users to promote their own services.

Snocap’s Linx service is also designed to let online retailers sell music from the companies huge selection of songs. Snocap has distribution deals with Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI Group and Warner Music, along with a number of independent labels.

David Berlind at ZDNet had an interesting point on the news on his blog this week.

“Actually, it’s the independents that will really benefit from MySpace as a sales channel (while the traditional labels go the iTunes, etc. route). While I don’t believe were at a tipping point yet, the idea of commerce-enabling MySpace for music sales could position indies for an interesting offensive against the entertainment establishment. And, with no DRM, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”

Related Reading

Napster Founder Commerce Enables Unprotected MP3s on MySpace (ZD Net Blogs)
Snocap Looks Beyond P2P (MP3.com)
Napster Guru Fanning Breaks Snocap Silence (Buzzsonic.com) Dec 3 2005
Mashboxx and Snocap Get Busy (Buzzsonic.com) May 6 2005
EMI Records Join the Snocap Queue (Buzzsonic.com) Nov 20 2004
Napster Founder in Major Label P2P Talks (Buzzsonic.com) Nov 13 2004

As a recording artist myself I’m always looking for new distribution outlets but so far I’ve been slow to exploit digital sales at all. Two mixes from my latest UK released 12 inch vinyl (yes they do still exist) single, ‘I’ll Be There’ are actually available at underground dance store Xpress Beats but with Apple’s iTunes store dominating 70-80% of the download market (depending on who you believe) its the one place you really want to be if you want to get in the online shop window.

I’ve been aware of digital music distribution aggregators for a while and have had a look around well known outlets like CD Baby and IODA so I was very interested in the news of newcomer TuneCore (tip via the essential Moses Avalon). Tunecore works much the same as most digital music aggregators in as much as they sign up artists and label content and place music on the all important download majors like iTunes, Napster and Rhapsody. The difference with Tunecore (FAQs here) is that there is no lengthy terms, no exclusivity and the killer for me, no percentage share of revenue (other outlets range from 8-15%).

There’s a very informative podcast interview with founder Jeff Price at the 75 Minutes blog which is well worth an hour of your time and needless to say Jeff is blogging about the whole thing here. I’ll be commenting further on this as we prepare to upload our first digital release to Tunecore very soon.

Founder Jeff Price is the owner of Spin Art Records other board members include the former head of RykoDisc, George Howard and Toolshed Inc. owner Dick Huey.

Related Reading

Digital Distributor Comparisons (MosesAvalon.com)
Back From Canadian Music Week (BradSucks.com)
Digital Music Report 2006-24 page PDF (IFPI.org)
Digital Music:Industry Answers (BBC News)
The Long Tail (Wired.com)
99th Floor Elevators (Floorelevators.com)
iTunes Outsells Traditional Music Stores (CNet News) Nov 21 2005
Apple Touts iTunes 80% UK Market Share (The Register) Sept 7 2005

Its been a while since we featured any posts on musical mash-ups here. Since the last mention (the excellent Green Day mash) the word mash up has taken on a slightly different meaning. Now the term is more likely associated with the latest Google Maps Api mash up rather than the latest frankenstein pop remix flying out of some digital DJ’s laptop studio.

Latest renegade remixers to join the fray are the Brooklyn based DJ duo Sound Advice who have ironically (see DJ Dangermouse) chosen to weld the music from the ubiquitous Gnarls Barkley album ‘St Elsewhere’ to the vocals from deceased rapper Biggie Smalls biggest hits.
The result is Gnarls Biggie a hit and miss collection of eleven tracks (all available as MP3’s naturally). ‘Smilie Faces Hypnotize’, ‘Gimme The Online Loot’ and ‘The Last Nasty Boy’ are worth more than one spin but the simple A vs. B formula is not nearly as inspired as the more elaborate examples of the ‘art’ like DJ Dangermouse’s (half of Gnarls Barkley) groundbreaking Beatles vs Jay Z mash up the ‘Grey Album’ or the aformentioned Green Day (or Dean Gray) remix project.

The guys have already got themselves banned from MySpace (though another ‘fan page’ has already sprung up). The cease and desist is in the post.

Related Reading

Gnarls Barkley Mashed Up with B.I.G (Spin.com)
Green Day Mash Up Leads to Cease and Desist Order, Grey Tuesday Style Protest (MTV News)
Grey Album Poducer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It (MTV News)
Gnarls Barkley (Wikipedia)
Sound Advice Blog (Blogspot)
Party Ben (PartyBen.com)
Mark Vidler (GoHomeProductions)
Grey Tuesday:A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain (EFF.org)
Grey Tuesday-Free the Grey Album (GreyTuesday.org)

Nothing new here I guess. Another frustrating time for anyone trying to access their MySpace page over the weekend with a series of outages for the ‘world’s busiest web property’.

The problems continued over the weekend into Monday morning where the site seemed to be completely down. I understand the problems of trying to scale to a user base so massive (between 45 and 80 million users depending on who you listen to) but still it all seems very shoddy when you consider the money floating around here. When was the last time Google or Yahoo was unusable?

Related Reading
MySpace Closed After Power Outage (BBC News)
MySpace Down Due to Power Outage (Digg)
Power Outage Knocks MySpace Offline (Netcraft.com)

I’ve mentioned the free iLounge iPod book download here before (when iLounge.com was still called iPodlounge.com). Well this week the iPod gadget website released the latest version of ‘The Free iPod Book’, (Version 2.2) which Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg recommended as the “free manual on getting the most from your iPod.”

The latest edition boasts 200 plus pages covering everything you could possibly imagine related to Apple’s iPod and iTunes and is available as a higher-res printable PDF or lower-res monitor friendly PDF download.

You can find a fuller description on the iLounge website here but its a rare thing on the internet, a freebie which carries more value than many paid downloads, whatever the category. Brilliant.
Download

The Free iPod Book 2.2 (hi-res 21mb PDF) Print Version
The Free iPod Book 2.2 (lower-res 13MB PDF) Monitor Version

Related Links

The iLounge Library (iLounge.com)
iPod Hacks (iPodhacks.com)
iPod Hackaday (Hackaday.com)
iPod and iTunes Product Guide (PlaylistMag.com)

Here’s a neat piece of software that I discovered care of Gina Trapani’s excellent weekly tipsheet ‘Geek To Live’ at Lifehacker.

If you’re like me you probably have a stack of passwords and log-ins hidden away in secure .doc files, scraps of paper and the like. Alternatively you can keep a secure and searchable database to retrieve those hard to remember passwords without compromising security using the free, open source software application KeePass.

There’s a great ‘how-to’ at Lifehacker here, so I wont repeat it.

Related Reading

Strong Passwords: How To Create and Use Them (Microsoft.com)
Choosing Your Password (Yahoo Security Center)

Here’s a great example of buzzword overkill. Tioti ( acronym: Tape It off the Internet) apparently started as an online joke back in November last year hyped as an electronic TV guide for the world - with links to BitTorrent files and also social applications for P2P discussion and sharing. The idea was taken seriously by some and went into proper development.

The homepage right now is little more than some basic info and the ubiquitous “give us your email address and we’ll tell you when we’re ready” invite box.

“Built using the robust J2EE Spring framework and making use of AJAX interface hotness, TIOTI brings Wiki-style content editing for you guys, plus tagging and RSS up the yazoo. We currently index 16,000+ TV shows - 88,000+ episodes - and we are matching everything up with an ever increasing number of content sources.”

So basically another You Tube wannabee with a bit of Tivo and BitTorrent thrown in for good measure. Throw in a site built on Ruby On Rails and Ajax, promised RSS feeds, IM and VOiP and you have a veritable quilt of Web 2.0 buzzwords.

Mashable.com have a more indepth look at the beta including screenshots. But there’s going to be thorny copyright issues for sure (as with You Tube). Om Malik mentioned the problems online video companies like Google Video and You Tube have with policing content earlier this year.

“I am not sure if this is a problem that is going to go away. Online video companies will have to figure out a policing mechanism… after all if CSI shows start showing up on Google video (not the store), Google’s partners at Viacom are not going to be too thrilled. Similarly SNL videos now for sale on iTunes store, available for free are going to become a headache of sorts for folks at You Tube.”
Related Reading

BitTorrent Meets YouTube (Mashable.com) July 14 2006
The RIAA Says No Dancing to Music on You Tube (TechDirt.com) June 14 2006
A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It (NY Times) Feb 20 2006
Google, YouTube & the Darkside of Online Video (GigaOm.com) Jan 15 2006
What is Web 2.0 (oreillynet.com) Sept. 30 2005

Lots of chatter in the blogosphere these past few days with the news that Chinese programmers have managed to reverse engineer the Skype protocol.

Charlie Paglee at VoipWiki.com seems to be the first off the block with this one with his post revealing how a business contact in China had contacted him on a beta version of the software.

Charlie explains it better than I can in the post thus:

“Right now every computer with Skype installed on it can be used as a relay to carry data between two other computers when both of those computers are only allowed to make outgoing TCP calls. This means that very soon Skype users will have an alternative client which will not hijack their computer. This could eventually have a very negative effect on the Skype network if too many people choose not to act as Skype Super Nodes and the network starts to deteriorate.”

In laymans terms this means that users could access the Skype VOIP network without using the Skype client, calls could be made through third party software directly to and from Skype users. Users would also not have the resource drain that often comes with running Skype.

This will certainly be raising eyebrows at Ebay who paid $2.6bn for the Internet telephony company last September. Though in a Skype PR statement published on TechCrunch the company dont seem unduly concerned.

“Skype is aware of the claim made by a small group of Chinese engineers that they have reverse engineered Skype software. We have no evidence to suggest that this is true. Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype which is enjoyed by over 100m users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype’s cryptographic security or integrity”

Skype’s software lets PC users talk to each other for free and make cut-price calls to mobiles and landlines.
Related Reading

Skypes Been Cracked? (Engadget.com) July 16th
Skype Cracked? (GigaOm.com) July 13th
Skype Protocol Has Been Cracked (Voipwiki.com) July 13th
Ebay to Buy Skype in $2.6bn Deal (BBC News) Sept 12th 2005

As you would expect with something as ubiquitous as MySpace (much like with Google) and its huge user base there’s an ever increasing army of unofficial ‘hacks’ adding features to the insanely popular social networking website.

Mashable have covered “feeding the Myspace beast” well so far here…and here
“The list of sites that feed the MySpace beast is growing longer by the day: RockYou, Slide, Photobucket, NooZ, Abazab, Umundo, Kiko Events, Frappr, BuddyPing, Sitepal, Stickam, Bunchball, MyPickList and Nabbr are among the more interesting plays….”

Some other interesting recent additions include MyWhatSpace a PC desktop app that lets you separate your MySpace friends into groups and send messages to all the members of any group at once. Sounds like a promising idea in theory but I couldn’t get the small app to run and load past the whole page of Adsense ads that greets you on the login page. Web 2.0 news site TechCrunch were overly gushing in praise for the app this week nevertheless.

There’s a possibility that the service violates the MySpace terms of service. The company has already shut down two other services (DatingAnyone and SingleStat.us) operating alongside MySpace in recent months.

The other new service affiliating itself as a ‘MySpace add on’ this past week is Supcast, a free service that allows you to send a text, picture or voice message from your phone directly to your MySpace or blog. Supcast joins a growing list of similar services which include Umundo and Abazab.

Trakzor is another neat idea. Simply put, you add some code to your MySpace profile and Trakzor tracks your visitors. The downside is the app only works if other MySpace users have the Trakzor code added to their profile too. This looks like a service that perhaps MySpace should add for marketers as a premium add-on themselves ?

Elsewhere Frappr, the popular Google Maps mash-up have added a neat hack that adds your MySpace user name to Google Maps and gives you a map of all your friends which you can add to your profile. There’s another unofficial MySpace map service here which maps out users by zip code.

MySpace News Coverage
MySpace Hacked! (TMZ.com) 16 July 2006
MySpace Soars, Hitwise Defends Figures (TechWeb.com) July 14 2006
MySpace vs Yahoo! Mail, or Apples vs Oranges (Jeremy Zawodny) July 12 2206
MySpace Not What You Think ( I Speak Of Dreams) July 11 2006
MySpace the 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla (TechCrunch.com) June 13 2006
The MySpace Economy (MicroPursuasion.com) June 8 2006
Dont Believe the MySpace Hype (CNNMoney.com) June 7 2006
Feeding the MySpace Beast (Mashable.com) April 19 2006
MySpace Business Lesson:Communication (Wisdump.com) April 18 2006
Scenes From the MySpace Backlash (Wired.com) Feb. 27 2006
Users Crowd Into MySpace (BusinessWeek.com) Nov. 15 2005
Why Murdoch Really Bought MySpace? (GigaOm.com) Aug.6 2005

Back in the day, Ajax was better known as a household cleaning product, or even a leading Amsterdam football (as in soccer) side, nowadays its an overused buzzword for (hold your breath) Asynchronus JavaScript and XML a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The first use of the term in public in this context was by Jesse James Garrett in his February 2005 article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications.

Anyway, I’m one of those people that buys a lot of domain names so I know searching for a new name has always been a little ‘clunky’. Of course there’s an increasing amount of search solutions using Ajax to make the experience a bit more aggreable. Squurl.com seems to be the nicest looking so far with a number of options from the neat drop down under the search box. Opinions at community tech news site Digg seem to suggest that Squurl is a carbon copy of the similar featured InstantDomainSearch.com . They both point to Yahoo domains for suggestions (should your search prove fruitless) and they both point to the useful ‘hack’ site Xona Domain Hacks which suggests alternative URL mash ups.
Domain Resources

Whois Domain Tools (DomainTools.com)
AlexaHolic.com
Ajax Powered Domain Searching (Lockergnome.net)

Google have quietly added a new Beta service to their wildly popular email service Gmail. Gmail for your domain is a free beta service giving website owners the chance of offering Gmail services to their readers. Simply put you can soon be dishing out email accounts @yourwebsite using Google’s hosted service, complete with 2gb of storage, calender and chat features.

The only difference from the main Gmail accounts is that the storage allowance is fixed at 2gb whereas the Gmail accounts storage increases automatically as your space depleats. We’re testing the service right now here at Buzzsonic . All the best email names at Gmail are gone by now of course so if you’d like the same service but with an easier to remember email address contact us here (email at buzzsonic.com) with your preferred email name (@ Buzzsonic.com, not Gmail remember !) and we’ll get back to you asap.
Related Reading
Gmail vs Windows Live Mail vs Yahoo Mail betas (The Inquirer)