Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
More About Eric »
24 Hour Dotcom Revisited
I’ve finally uploaded a very entertaining documentary film about the 24 Hour Dotcom online for viewing and downloading at ourmedia.org. Big thanks to Ben Pohl and Sebastian Gollek for creating the film!
Champagne flashmob. Watch the film here.
In other news, a site called Yubnub placed 2nd in the recent Railsday competition (in which teams are to create a web app with Ruby on Rails in 24 hours). Yubnub is very similar to Dozomo — the site we built in 24 hours — and has received lots of hype. Looks like we’ve got competition! I’m still addicted to Dozomo though, partly because of it’s glorious Ajaxified command completion. We’ve also got some new features coming up within the next few weeks (search history with command completion are among them).
Nokia and Upcoming.org?
In this cryptic post, Andy from upcoming.org announces that Nokia is working on a mobile version of Upcoming and that they need your feedback. Hmm…Interesting!
Towards the heavenly jukebox
A little over a month ago I visited last.fm in their very east Londonish office. Talking to the team, I got to know about some really cool things that they have in store for the future. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to talk about it here…
Mischa, Martin and Johan at last.fm.
One of the things they’re already doing though, is spidering (both manually and automatically) P2P networks, constantly feeding the radio database with terabytes of new material. Since they have a valid radio license, it’s fully legal!
This reminded me about what I wrote in 2003:
“Now, if file sharing apps would implement the cache model and rareness indexing I’m currently emulating manually, so that songs I never play are purged automatically from my local node and downloaded again upon request or automatically as their rareness indexes drops below critical, and if we could implement a way of auto-discovering other people with similar tastes by comparing my collection with theirs, it would make it even harder for commercial alternatives. Not to say if we’d come up with a cross-P2P search engine working on Google principles — “Yoodle”!”
Indy — a fairly new, client based “competitor” to last.fm — actually has a very simple caching functionality, resembling what I spoke of above. It basically dedicates more space for music relative to the rating you give it; 5 star music gets 1GB, 4 star gets 500MB, 3 star gets 100MB, etc. The cache is then FIFO-purged automatically.
Alas, I never got convinced by Indy since the music it plays simply is too bad. I believe the base of CC-licensed music actually isn’t there yet in terms of quality. I ended up pressing the 1 star button for every track, desperately hoping for the collaborative filtering system to find something good for me — but it never happened. I think I had one 3 star track out of 25 bad ones…
So I’m back to last.fm for now, thinking it would be very cool if we could somehow integrate last.fm with Indy, getting the best of both worlds.
Up(and)coming
Andrew Baio (creator of upcoming.org) just told me that the upcoming API now has full tag support. I’m now displaying tags on the event feed here.
The addition of tags+API definitely was the tipping point — now I’m really using the service. I’ve got several iCal subscriptions; Stockholm, Helsinki, and Berlin.
Couple of things; The hierarchy of metros should probably be flat altogether, editing of events could be more wikified, the fixed event categories should be dropped in favor of folksonomy. All in all: Kudos to Andrew!
Backpack is out!
Last weekend reminded me that breaking up with girlfriends sucks. Big time. Anyway, I’m slowly recovering, and things got a bit better after trying out Backpack, the new wiki/todo-list/PIM web app from the signals. Really can’t decide if this is useful social software or not. Still missing realtime collaborative editing though — heard some rumors about them working on that. I’m in bad need of a SubEthaEdit for the web, and I guess lots of other people are too. They just don’t know that yet.
First nail in the coffin for Flash?
Adobe buys Macromedia and suddenly SVG might get a revival! I’d really like to see that happen, as it is a much more Web 2.0 savvy technology than Flash will ever be.
Todd Dominey and Dave Shea has good posts.
Del.icio.us got cash!
What does Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young have in common? They are all investing in Del.icio.us!
Sure hope that will make our favorite bookmarks service even better! People are complaining about its user interface, but I’d rather argue that that is its big advantage. I’d really be in favor of a Greasemonkey-style customization feature though — a use-your-own-stylesheet kind of approach.
From Joi
Lickr
Greasemonkey is clearly showing the way. What’s so cool about it is that it enables users of websites to actually contribute code to them!
A good example: I used to be annoyed by the fact that Flickr used Flash to display photos on individual photo pages. On OS X, it causes a slight delay in the loading of each page, destroying the otherwise slick user experience. Meet Lickr. It solves this problem quite elegantly by providing a javascript version of the photo display widget. Sure hope the Flickr folks are listening!
I wonder if there is a way for Greasemonkey to add something to the User-Agent HTTP-header so that site owners can be notified when their sites are being “remixed”. That would totally close the loop.
This blog needs more color!
I realised that after assaulting it with a paintball gun. I also got the chance to give vent to my feelings for the RIAA. Please do try this at home, it’s mighty fun.
By the way, being able to do this with Flash seems a bit dangerous, I mean aren’t there any security implications here..!?
From Anna.
456 Berea Street redesigns
Roger Johansson, the guy who runs 456 Berea Street, (an excellent web design blog — probably the best out of Sweden) redesigned and linked to me today! I’m happy to get such a warm welcome in the blogosphere — this will definitely keep me going for a while…