David Emery OnlineMetallica Repents, Sort Of
This is not how to do it. I love that they make a big fuss about pre-ordering and getting the music “first” where first means “midnight on the day of release”, which is the same time you’ll be able to get it on every other download service (and probably cheaper, too).
They seem to have watched Radiohead and NIN do their thing, and ripped it off without any of the innovation or interest. $125 for a 5 LP + CD + Download + “Platinum Mission:Metallica Experience“ (which seems to amount to some live recordings and ringtones…) doesn’t exactly seem like a great deal.
Visit ➔Sharing mixtapes is an unstoppable idea. Muxtape is not.
Anthony’s not wrong – the concept of a mixtape or sharing a playlist of tracks with your friends is obviously one that resonates, but centralisation like Muxtape will only lead to the traditional set of legal problems (which will no doubt cripple it).
Decentralisation is the solution.
Visit ➔asv_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.
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