David Emery OnlineRecord Labels Strategically Invest $2.8M in MOG
Universal is really investing in the music orientated social network space, which makes a lot of sense – they must spend a very significant amount of money on both advertising on social networks and effort in trying to get good promotional placement on them. It’s pretty unnerving though – you don’t want the market leader (with about 33% total market share) controlling – what is essentially – the presses.
Visit ➔Last.Fm personal wallpaper generator
Generates a desktop picture collage of albums you’ve listened to on Last.fm. Read: totally awesome.
Visit ➔An Ephemeral Site: Denna Jones
Lovely work (both the site design and its content), and it’s interesting to see another site that uses CakePHP and SimplePie to pull in content from outside sources (which is what we do on xlrecordings.com).
Visit ➔YouTube in MP4 via QuickTime Plugin!
A simple bookmarklet that magically turns a video on youtube from low-quality Flash into high quality quicktime. Doesn’t work on all videos apparently, although it’s worked with all the ones I’ve tried.
Visit ➔Video Comments on WordPress Blogs
Another takeaway message is: video is coming, and it will be everywhere.
No, it’s not; video is not going to ‘take over’ from text anymore then podcasts took over from blogs (which lots of people were claiming would happen at the time). Yes online video is important and will get increasing use as the technology becomes easier to implement, but the web is primarily a text based medium and is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Visit ➔Facebook Chat Now Works For Everyone
I’m actually very impressed with Facebook Chat – while it’s obviously not revolutionary they’ve done it right. Of course, what I’d really like is Jabber support so I can use it in Adium/iChat, but I’m not sure if that really meshes with Facebook’s strategy of keeping everything on site (hence no RSS feed for the news feed, for example).
Visit ➔Embed your data- in HTML 5
This looks very useful – while you can sort of do this already in xhtml using custom namespaces that’s a bit complicated; this looks far easier. Also, it could also be used nicely for microformats and the like (and get rid of that darn abbr pattern).
Visit ➔Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business
I think the concept of streaming and embedable music (that is paid for by either direct advertising or a royalty structure) is definitely the future of music on the web. However, it’s worth noting that I think this is a companion to traditional digital retailers, not a replacement.
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