Idio, a cool service that takes your musical tastes and serves up blog articles about musicians it thinks you might like, has added a handy feature for people who want to actually listen to the artists they're reading about. Its new built-in music player creates a track list of artists based on what you're reading about. Prior to this player, the service had little embedded clips you could click to listen to, but the newer iteration is a full player with playlist and button navigation.
When I first looked at Idio, I proclaimed it "Rolling Stone 2.0" and I stand by that. Print publications can't touch this kind of integration; that is unless they've got a pack-in CD and cues to skip to various tracks like a museum tour. In the recent months since my first look, the number of sources has increased, as well as the number of articles that now sits at over 6,000 a month. I hope that this will solve one of my main complaints, which was the recycling of articles from issue to issue. The service is also building a network of independent journalists who contribute to future magazines.
Reading about artists in Idio can now be accompanied by music related to what you're reading about. Neat.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Idio is an online music magazine that launched late last year. Idio looks and feels like a paper magazine, with turning pages and some pretty slick-looking layouts. What's neat is that Idio isn't just made up of text and photos, there are also music and video clips embedded right into the pages. Users get content fed to them by an algorithm that selects articles or clips (it thinks) you might be interested in based on your favorite bands. Content comes from all over, either from blogs or music news feeds.
To drill down into your musical tastes a little further, you can go into each genre and pick out which styles you like. Each subgenre is given a tag, and you can click on it to change how much impact it has on your feeds. Idio will then sort through the content to tailor it to your new choices.
Idio has built in some social democracy functionality to the interface. You can dig deeper into an article, either by giving it a thumbs up or down (as with StumbleUpon) or by using a simple slider with a heart to show how much relevance it has to your musical tastes. You can also comment on a story, although you're likely to get a richer commenting experience by visiting the blog or the site where the story originated.
Idio is very pretty, but I found it recycled some of the same content after using it for a few days. I can't recommend it for breaking music news and long, in-depth content, because you're not going to get it. What's more interesting is the platform and design, which reminds me of the HyperComics viewer I looked at in January. It's a fun throwback to the visceral feel of reading a magazine, which admittedly feels a little awkward in a Web browser but is still full of possibilities for rich media viewing, given the right content.
The layout of an Idio magazine is two pages at a time. To flip to the next page, either click on the page icons at the bottom of the screen, or click on the corner of a page you're looking at.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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