David Emery Onlineasv_tumblelog
A tumblelog plugin for Textpattern which looks very useful as a way of pulling in posts, videos, links and photos on to your site. Irritatingly I found this the day after I had to hack together a way of doing this for an upcoming site… always the way!
Visit ➔Building the Next Last.fm
The new Last.fm beta is very nice – so much clearer and better laid out then before. They also managed to make me lay down some cash to become a subscriber so I could get access – I imagine I’m not the only one…
Visit ➔Two Posts - One Comment Thread
I don’t think that comments should really be run as a separate service, but there’s certainly an ever increasing need for some form of standard comment API so that comments can be shared across multiple sites.
One of my main problems with FriendFeed is that it creates an additional layer of conversation on top of content that normally has a conversation thread already going on the original site – whether that’s a blog posts comments or comments on a photo on Flickr. If services like this could tap into the original comment thread, I guess using something akin to XMLRPC that would be much better, but obviously if we allow posting comments via an API we’d have to think hard how to make to spam proof.
Visit ➔On Internet hype (not machine)
Couldn’t agree more with this – internet and blog hype isn’t really changing too much, it’s simply an outlet for peoples opinions.
Visit ➔Friend Connect And The End Of The Fragmentation Era
Google’s Friend Connect – and the whole Data Portability thing – seem like they could potentially be a good solution for the whole ‘too many social networks’ problem. It could also mean that niche social networks (for a band, for example) might actually start making sense if they’re just an extension of your presence on a different (bigger) network.
Visit ➔Twitter revenue
Ethan talks about using Twitter as a $1/month private fanclub news source, which is kind-of interesting but I have a real distaste for the whole ‘monetized fanclub’ thing which a few people have tried (Bloc Party and the Mighty Boosh both come to mind).
Surely the way to reward your hardcore fans isn’t to try and charge them for it?
Visit ➔Pitchfork Feature: Radiohead: "Nude RE/MIX"
Ok, I realise I’ve gone on about this a little too much, but this is a nice little summary of the whole thing and highlights some of the best mixes (although I’m sure there are still some hidden gems waiting to be found).
Visit ➔Mirror's Edge Trailer
Mirror’s Edge is a fully first person action game coming soon for the Playstation 3, and it seems to have finally cracked the ‘floating camera with no legs’ problem most first person perspective games seem to suffer from:
Visit ➔When the fall is all that’s left
I couldn’t agree more; Mozilla’s attitude stinks, and has for a long time.
Visit ➔Albert Hammond Jr
Lovely little site we’ve just launched for Albert Hammond Jr – it’s just a mailing list signup for the time being but we thought we’d spice that up by letting you upload a photo at the same time, which we using million dollar homepage style to make the background of the site.
Visit ➔Monotone Wordpress Theme
I really like the idea of automatically sampling colours from an uploaded photo to theme a web page. Obviously the hat tip has to go to Mezzoblue, but making it automatic opens up some interesting possibilities.
Visit ➔Adobe’s Open Screen Project: Write Once, Flash Everywhere
Well, at least Silverlight has been useful for something – Adobe has opened up the Flash specification, paving the way for much greater Flash support almost everywhere. What I’d really like to see is for Apple to write their own Flash plugin – much like they have with PDF – that isn’t quite so rubbish (and runs on iPhones as well).
Visit ➔Record 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 ➔