As a former record store clerk turned cubicle drone, I'm all too aware of how out of touch I am with today's underground music scene. Really, my only tether to the music world beyond iTunes is a site called The Hype Machine, which aggregates the audio streams from hundreds of influential music blogs, and throws them into a big ol' jukebox.
Aside from working like a Cliff Notes for indie music hipsters, The Hype Machine has proven itself as a valuable tool for artists and music labels. Just like trending topics on sites such as Digg or Twitter, songs that spend time on Hype Machine's popularity chart tend to spin under their own momentum, getting retweeted, embedded, passed around Facebook, and maybe even purchased a few times.
But the path to getting your music listed on The Hype Machine isn't easy or reliable. Songs need to find their way from the site's preferred independent music blogs, who act as middlemen for encoding the song, adding the correct track information (hopefully), and hosting it on their blog. The resulting audio file is out of the control of the artist or label, and all the valuable stream data is lost to the content creator.
Fortunately, a new partnership with Web audio host SoundCloud should put some control back in the hands of artists and labels. By making the SoundCloud audio player detectable by The Hype Machine's music aggregator, artists and labels can now create and control the streaming audio player directly, leaving bloggers to just cut and paste the embed code.
If the symbiosis of SoundCloud and The Hype Machine takes root, bloggers can spend less time encoding and hosting files, and artists and labels will gain the stream analytics and control they were missing before. But for the system to work, musicians and labels will need to embrace SoundCloud and consistently release their legitimate streams before pirated material becomes available. Indie music label Domino Recordings has already committed to the arrangement, but it remains to be seen if other labels will follow suit.
The biggest roadblock to the venture's success is that content creators are required to hold a premium SoundCloud account. At minimum, a premium SoundCloud account runs 29 euros ($41) per year, however, active musicians and labels are encouraged to upgrade to a less restrictive "Solo" account, for 9 euros ($13) per month. Free accounts are available to all users, but only premium accounts are compatible with the new The Hype Machine partnership.
Over the last few months, you may have noticed the Meebo Bar gracing the bottom of some Web sites, mostly large blogs, or other similar big content sites. That's because previously, the Meebo Bar was only available to select partners, so the little guys were mostly shut out. Now, Meebo is making the Meebo Bar available for all Web sites, with a specific focus on blogs.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Meebo Bar, it's a JavaScript plug-in that sits at the bottom of Web pages. It enables a lot of different social interaction and sharing features, such as displaying a specific stream of tweets, promoting a Facebook fan page, as well as Stumbling or Digging the page. The Meebo Bar also allows users to chat with their friends through the IM platform that made Meebo famous. Additionally, the Meebo Bar enables easy sharing of content on the page through its very slick Meebo Share Dock.
The bar is extremely easy to set up on blogs, especially TypePad, self-hosted Wordpress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, all of which have preconfigured solutions, built by Meebo. For those with other setups, the installation just consists of inserting a code snippit, something to which we have become very accustomed. Users can customize which features appear on their Meebo Bar all on Bar.meebo.com. The changes are then pushed out to the installation on your site in a matter of minutes.
Users can customize the Meebo Bar for their site with a variety of buttons.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)This version of the Meebo Bar, for everyone, includes all of the same features that it offers to its partner sites, which is something that they were really shooting for with this release, Daniel Bernstein, Meebo's director of business development tells CNET. Meebo Bar users get all of the features of the bar, as well as detailed sharing analytics to see how people are using it, all for the low, low price of...free.
The Meebo Bar is a really great way of enabling a lot of different types of sharing and content interaction very quickly and easily. The sharing that results could, potentially, be a big driver of traffic back to sites. It's really great to see this rich functionality being adapted into to a "self-serve" type of system. With so many more possible installs out there, the Meebo Bar should see a huge explosion in growth.
Meebo's Share Dock pops out when you drag a piece of content on an enabled site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)
In a turn of events that has sent the blog world into a frenzy, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington said on Monday that the CrunchPad tablet computer that he announced more than a year ago is officially dead.
According to Arrington, Fusion Garage, his company's manufacturing partner, said that it would take over full control of the CrunchPad project and cut TechCrunch out just days before its debut.
"Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project," Arrington wrote on TechCrunch. "[Fusion Garage CEO] Chandra [Rathakrishnan] said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement."
Fusion Garage, according to Arrington, wanted to offer him the opportunity to "assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head." The company would also acquire Arrington's rights to the CrunchPad name and brand. Arrington said that Fusion Garage and his company "jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property," but Arrington's firm solely owns the CrunchPad trademark.
For now, we only know Arrington's side of the story. (Disclosure: I wrote for TechCrunch in 2008.) He claims that he was ready and willing to launch CrunchPad with Fusion Garage. He said that he is "enraged, embarrassed, and just...sad." He plans to unleash a flurry of lawsuits on Fusion Garage.
But as you might expect, TechCrunch isn't providing the only word on the matter. Blogs across the Web are giving their two cents on where they stand on Arrington's announcement and the CrunchPad itself. Some support Arrington and still hope the CrunchPad will hit store shelves. Others aren't so sure.
Let's take a quick look around the Web to find out what others are saying.
Supporters
Gizmodo: "The whole situation is lousy, and FusionGarage certainly doesn't come out looking all that smart in it. I can't imagine anyone wanting to work with them again after this, but I guess we'll have to wait and hear what their side of the story is."
OSNews: "This is all very sad. The CrunchPad had a lot of promise, because it was driven by the very best incarnation of the Hacker Ethos. Talented and driven people, who surveyed the marketplace and failed to find a device that met their wants and needs, pulled together hardware and software talent to bring their dreams to reality, and designed a very appealing-looking device. It's a thin, light, open, relatively inexpensive device for "couch computing," and because the designers were motivated by a desire to have the device for themselves and make it available to as many others as possible, there were no hidden agendas or app stores or value-added nonsense or artificial limits on use, such as exist in the iPhone or Kindle or Sony eBook ecosystems."
Slashgear: "Away from the production wrangles, it's disappointing news both for anybody interested in portable electronics and for those to whom the CrunchPad project represented the potential for individuals and small companies to come up with an idea and make it reality."
Techland: "It seems as though Fusion Garage was being pressured by shareholders to ditch Arrington and co. They seem to forget that Arrington is a former lawyer and a pitbull at that."
Ubergizmo: "Of course, we haven't heard both sides of the story yet, but based on what we've heard (from TC), it all does seem a little sad. At least it has generated its fair share of marketing and publicity for TC, and that's worth something."
Detractors
JKOntheRun: "A basic on-screen keyboard for a 12-inch slate simply won't cut it for most people. It's too large to thumb-type on, which means you'll be holding the device in one hand while pecking with another. And the price is another issue. $300 buys you what I'd consider an equally portable, yet far more function device in either a Netbook or a smartphone. Unless there was a subsidy model in play, a web-only tablet isn't what folks expect for $300 or more."
Technologizer: "Arrington has always said that the CrunchPad sprung from his own desire to have a "dead simple" tablet he could use to get online from his couch. I get his desire. Well, mostly: I've never been entirely clear why the CrunchPad would be a better couch computer than a more typical, versatile cheap portable computer."
Wired: "Arrington's earlier promises regarding the CrunchPad never panned out, and his latest missive only points to his inability to walk the talk."
So while it seems that the Web is split over where they stand on Arrington and the CrunchPad, it's arguably John Gruber over at Daring Fireball who best summed up the CrunchPad news: "No word from Popular Mechanics yet on whether they get to keep their product of the year award."
Now it's your turn. Share your thoughts on the death of the CrunchPad below.
Blog platform company Six Apart is adding a free, miniaturized blogging service to its paid blog hosting service TypePad. The new TypePad Micro service is essentially a simplified template, called Chroma, for unpaid users on the TypePad service. It will likely be compared with Posterous and Tumblr.
The Chroma template is flexible and attractive, and most of the blogs I've seen using it look good. It's a great format for short posts and for sharing pictures and embedded videos.
But as a short-form blog authoring platform, TypePad Micro is still TypePad, a powerful and capable blogging system that may be overkill for people who just want a way to post quick items. The main Quick Compose interface is nice and light, but one level down, the options are overwhelming. In comparison, Tumblr's posting interface is light and clean all the way through. Posterous' Web interface is even leaner, and if that's still too much for you, you can start blogging on it via e-mail, without even setting up an account on the Web site. (To be fair, you can also post to TypePad Micro via e-mail.)
The new Chroma template is well-suited to short posts and images.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Still, what Six Apart is doing with TypePad Micro is probably good for Six Apart and it's definitely good for writing and writers. From the product perspective, CEO Chris Alden believes that there's a somewhat open space in the blogging world between full-on blogs like TypePad and micro-blogs like Twitter. He envisions TypePad Micro as a good starting point for people who want to say more than they can on Twitter and don't want to pay for it (thus putting TypePad Micro in competition with the free Wordpress.com). He also sees it as a supplementary blog template for paying TypePad customers who want a new outlet for quick posts.
There is a quick posting form for TypePad Micro, but the rest of the author's site is complex.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)And if you care about writing, as I do, you'll love the new micro formats like this one, since they encourage people to write shorter posts. Since you have to think more when you're writing for a small space, this is good.
The TypePad platform also integrates into the modern world of Twitter, Facebook, and the like: Every time you post, the platform can automatically send alerts out to dozens of other accounts. And stealing a feature from Twitter, Movable Type lets readers "follow" TypePad blogs.
TypePad Micro is live now.
Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).
Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the page or menu you were looking at. This also keeps you from losing anything you hadn't saved if you're interrupted--even if you were in the middle of a writing a sentence when your phone rang. This should change the beginning of such a conversation from "I am so mad at you right now" to a simple "hello."
In addition to remembering what you were doing, the app does a much better job at letting you manage user comments. The approval screen itself looks almost identical, but the app now lets you quickly switch between the ones that have been approved and the ones that still need to be looked at. It also displays each users' Gravatar (user icon) next to their username and URL, which ends up taking up a little more space than it did in the previous iteration of the app but adds a sense of familiarity with its desktop sibling.
Other small changes include the app remembering which order you uploaded the photos in so that they display in that same order in your post. Although the app still hasn't been updated to include videos, which means 3GS owners will have to add whatever video they shot through WordPress' Web interface instead. The app also now stores passwords in a user's keychain, which means those credentials could be accessed by other applications you may want to give access to later on down the line--like, say an app that lets you post videos to a WordPress blog.
Oddly enough, the new WordPress app is completely different from the original, which still exists but will no longer be updated. The company attributes this to having switched between having an outside contractor make the first version, whereas this new one was built in-house.
The new look makes it simply to hop between comments, posts and pages. User Gravatars are now visible too.
(Credit: WordPress)
Google announced on Tuesday that its Google Analytics Web site-tracking tool has been improved with a slew of new features for enterprise-class users.
To start things off, Google announced that it has added the option for users to measure user engagement and branding success. The company said users will be able to "to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit."
With the help of a new feature called Advanced Table Filtering, Analytics users will now be able to filter content more effectively and view that content in a table. According to Google, users can "filter thousands of keywords" to find, for example, "just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30 percent and that referred at least 25 visits."
Going mobile
Google is also looking towards mobile phones. Analytics will track traffic to the user's mobile Web site. According to Google, whether or not the device visitors use to access the mobile site has JavaScript running won't matter, which means most mobile phones will be supported. That said, users who want to track mobile traffic will need to add "a server-side code snippet" to their mobile site. Google said the code will be made available in the coming weeks.
Continuing on its mobile focus, "iPhone and Android mobile-application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a Web site," Google said.
For those users who want more capable usage data than simple page views and unique visitors, Google has added a Multiple Custom Variables option. Users can now "define and track visitors according to visitor attributes, session attributes, and by page-level attributes. This feature isn't currently available to Analytics users. It will be making its way to all user accounts "in the coming weeks," Google said.
Intelligence, anyone?
Perhaps the most interesting announcement coming from Google is the company's contention that Analytics can now "tell you what to pay attention to."
Dubbed Analytics Intelligence, Google's new tool will analyze traffic data and alert users when there is a "significant" change in data patterns. Although the company didn't define "significant," it did say that if it sees a "300 percent surge in visits from YouTube referrals" or "bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70 percent two weeks ago," users would be alerted.
Since so-called "intelligent" tracking can get a little annoying at times, Google has also implemented a Custom Alerts feature, allowing users to tell the service what to watch for. According to Google, users can set "daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by e-mail or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur." Like many of the other features Google announced, Analytics Intelligence will make its way to Analytics accounts in the coming weeks.
If you're interested in learning more or seeing some of these features in action, click here.
WPtouch from Wordpress.
(Credit: Wordpress)In an attempt to make its blogs more mobile-friendly, Wordpress has launched two themes that will automatically be displayed when a Wordpress.com blog is accessed from a cell phone, the company announced Tuesday.
The type of mobile phone a user employs dictates what the different blogs will look like, the company said in a blog post. A modified version of WPtouch will be displayed on phones with "modern Web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones," the company wrote. A second, unnamed theme from an old version of Wordpress Mobile Edition will be displayed on all other mobile devices.
The themes will be displayed automatically, regardless of the themes used for normal browsing.
According to Wordpress, those who access Wordpress.com blogs from their iPhone or Android-based devices will be able to access the particular blog's "posts, pages, and archives." WPtouch will also support AJAX-based "commenting and post-loading." Header images will be scaled to fit the device's screen.
Those accessing blogs on other phones won't be treated to all the bells and whistles. According to the company, those visitors will see a simple page that focuses mainly on loading blog content as quickly as possible.
The decision to automatically display two themes was rooted in the success of mobile devices, Wordpress said in the blog post. So far, the company said, mobile devices have helped its Wordpress.com blogs generate 60 million page views per month. But content was loading slowly or, in some cases, not at all. By automatically displaying these two themes, Wordpress can limit those issues.
If you're a Wordpress.com blogger and you want to learn more, click here.
Since I spend so much of my time writing on the Web, I've come across some tools that have helped me become more efficient. Of course, there are lots of resources available to bloggers, so I should note that I don't expect this roundup to be the "be-all, end-all" of blogger helpers.
Everyone has at least a couple tools they find extremely helpful. Share your favorites in the comments below. And if you're a Firefox user, consider trying out these 15 add-ons, designed specifically for bloggers.
Get more productive
After the Deadline If you want to make sure that your blog post is properly edited, using After the Deadline might be your best bet. The app, which can also be downloaded as a WordPress plug-in, analyzes your blog posts to ensure that your spelling and grammar are correct.
I first came across After the Deadline when it was acquired by Automattic. Since then, I've been quite impressed by the service. It's almost invariably accurate and useful. After the Deadline is available as a WordPress plug-in so it automatically analyzes your posts, but the site also provides a "demonstration module" for those who don't use WordPress.
After the Deadline is for anyone looking to improve their writing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Copyscape If you're concerned that there are sites on the Web stealing your content, Copyscape is worth checking out. The service allows you to input a URL into the search field. Once you do so, it finds sites that may be copying your pages for their own gain. From there, it provides a links to those sites, so you can see what exactly is being copied.
If you're concerned that your content is being used for purposes you don't approve of, Copyscape is a site worth checking out.
Find out if someone is copying your site with Copyscape.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)So many blogs, so little time. If you feel like the blogosphere is passing you by, check out Regator, a new app that culls the Web's best posts.
An offshoot of the eponymous Web service, Regator (agg-regator, get it?) differs from traditional RSS feed readers in that it doesn't rely on you to choose the blogs you want to follow.
Instead, the app employs "qualified human editors" to bring you "topical, well-written, frequently updated, and relevant" posts. In other words, the cream of the blogosphere crop, at least according to these guys.
You can browse the posts any number of ways, starting with "popular" items from the Web at large or looking within a couple dozen specific topics (from Academics to "What the?").
Regator also provides a full directory of more than 500 topics, so you can really drill into the areas that interest you most. (Beekeeping? Check. Museums? Check.)
... Read More
Metaplace is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, that runs in Flash. It doesn't have nearly as many users as Second Life, nor the cult following of World of Warcraft.
But in an announcement that could go a long way in helping the service expand beyond its 6,000 active users, Metaplace worlds can now be embedded into a blog.
Once that embed is complete, Metaplace users can play in the world right on the blog. If the blog author adds multiple embeds of different worlds, the gamers can be in each of them simultaneously.
Is Metaplace really the kind of service that would make you want to create a world and embed into your blog?
Metaplace worlds can now be embedded in blogs.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)I had the chance to try out Metaplace. And although it has some issues, for the most part, the service is well worth a gamer's time.
... Read More
