David Emery OnlineFacebook 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.
Visit ➔Sonific Heading To The Deadpool: Record Labels Blamed
Note to startups: don’t base your entire business model on other peoples content that you don’t have the rights to use.
Visit ➔No CSS Reset
I completely agree – I don’t ever use a CSS reset style sheet. It seems like far too much hard work putting back in all the styling you’ve overridden, not mention that if you’re using a CMS you’re going to have to make sure that you’ve got everything that someone could enter (uls, dls, blockquotes etc) covered.
Visit ➔Grooveshark Launches Awesome Streaming Music Service
You know what? This is actually pretty good, and has one of the best flash-based interfaces I’ve seen in quite a while.
Visit ➔Examining Twinkle for the iPhone
Twinkle is yet another reason to jailbreak your iPhone. At its core it’s a Twitter client, and a very good one at that, but what makes it really interesting is that if you update using Twinkle it can optionally (and by default) save your location whilst you do so, using the iPhone location APIs. You can then see a list of twitters by, say, everyone within a 1 mile radius of you, which is pretty remarkable.
More proof we’re living in the future etc…
Visit ➔Introducing CSS Gradients
WebKit now supports CSS gradients, which is pretty awesome – you can now make fully Web 2.0 compliant designs with rounded corners, gradients and drop shadows fully in CSS in WebKit. If only everyone else (looks in Firefox and IE’s directions) would implement all these features as quickly as the WebKit folks are…
Visit ➔Buzznet Acquires Music Blog Idolator from Gawker Media
I can’t help but think that Buzznet (and hence Universal) owning two of the largest music blogs is really not a good thing. Luckily for us, 10 more – just as good – will spring up to take their place.
Visit ➔Monocle: design notes
Possibly one of the longest blog posts I’ve ever read, but well worth getting through – while I’m not really a fan of Monocle’s content (a little too pretentious for my liking) the design of both the web site and the magazine is exemplary.
Visit ➔Last.fm: Free music streams turn into increased music sales
Guess what? Listening to music makes people want to buy music. Who’d have thought it?
Visit ➔The MySpace Deal
Bob hits the nail on the head here – a year ago the MySpace music deal would have been interesting but in today’s market it’s quite pedestrian.
Visit ➔Apple passes Wal-Mart, now #1 music retailer in US
It’s pretty remarkable that a once ailing computer company can move into such an established market and completely dominate it so quickly.
Visit ➔Next to Last.fm
I’d love an interface for Last.fm that works for tracks I just ‘hear’ (not play) – using Twitter sounds like a good way of making it work.
Visit ➔Interscope Joins $25M Buzznet Investment Round
This is quite interesting, especially when you consider that Buzznet bought Stereogum recently.
Visit ➔Rockstar and Amazon bring digital music distribution to GTA4
I think video games are becoming an ever more relevant resource for promoting and selling music, although this system sounds a little clumsy. What we be much more interesting would be if you could buy direct in-game and have the track downloaded to your PC automatically. That would probably be a little tricky with Amazon, but Apple handle a pretty similar thing with the iTunes store on the iPhone…
Also, instead of getting an email with a playlist in it would be much better to have Last.fm scrobbling support in game – that would be a very welcome development.
Visit ➔Why do people buy records?
Well worth a read, especially the points highlighting the self fulfilling prophecy that is the ‘record sales are going down’ meme. However, like many people I’ve seen write about ‘collecting’ music and the rise of vinyl Patrick does miss out on a new trend I’m seeing in younger music fans: they still collect music, but they collect digital music.
They’ve grown up with music being something you play via an iPod, but that doesn’t mean the collecting bug has gone away; they’re just trying to complete their iTunes library, not their record shelf.
Visit ➔Mail.appetizer
It’s finally available for Leopard – hooray! For those that don’t know it provides a little popup notification window when you get mail in Mail.app and is utterly indispensable (along with MailTags).
Visit ➔Muxtape. The Simplest Mixtape Service Yet.
It’s obviously going to get shut down at some point fairly soon, but until then Muxtape is a beautiful piece of work. All it does is let you share a ‘mixtape’, or collection of MP3s you’ve uploaded, but it does it perfectly. A very good example of ‘less is more’.
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