David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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How does a Pitchfork review affect an album's popularity?

Pitchfork is a popular-as-hell indie music blog. It's got a hipster-snobby reputation and the reviews are best summarised as "When Adjectives Attack," but their recommendations tend to be on the money and I've found a lot of good music thanks to their Best New Music category.

Pitchfork's also got a reputation of being a real tastemaker, anointing new albums & artists to the big leagues. But is this backed up by the data? I decided to find out.

In short: they don’t (although you need more data for a less flippant conclusion). Also: yay for graphs!

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Early Results: Social News and the Open Graph

With the Open Graph , publishers can build a new kind of news app that makes it easy for people to discover what their friends are reading, and look back at top articles over time. As part of these features, we've also introduced new settings so people can easily control the experience after they opt-in. Each user decides if he or she wants to install a social news app, chooses the audience of who can see their activity with it, and can make edits to their settings at anytime.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism (a lot of which is pretty spot on) of some of the news publications and their integration with Facebook using the new Open Graph APIs, as typically they hijack links posted by other people to Facebook and funnel them into a custom app, and also auto-share things to the FB ticker.

These criticisms are almost universally directed at Facebook, but as this post shows it’s the publishers that should be getting the flack; yes, potentially Facebook could potentially place more restrictions on what the APIs can do, but almost all of the issues are on the publishers end.

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Announcing Little Printer and BERG Cloud

Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.

You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from — it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special.

This is just a little bit magical. There’s something incredibly compelling about a device that takes the modern internet – Foursquare checkins and all – and makes it something physical.

Also, the design and accompanying video are perfect:

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The Wired.co.uk Podcast 52

We'll cover the week in Wired news as normal, including stories about the first lab-grown hamburgers, airmiles for cyclists, batteries that charge in 15 minutes, wine bottles made from paper and Mongolia's plan to cool itself with giant blocks of ice.

And we'll also look back at the last year of trends we've covered on the show. Nate, Duncan, Katie and Liv each pick their favourite topic and we bring a whole host of special expert guests onto the show to discuss how those trends will evolve over the next year.

At about 31mins in you can hear me talk a little bit about music apps (and it turns out I don’t at all sound like I think I do).

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Responsive Advertising

Recently at Mark Boulton Design, we’ve been working on a redesign of the global visual language for a large sports network. Like many web sites delivering news and editorial content, they rely on advertising for their revenue — either through multiple ad slots on the page, or from video pre-rolls.

Early on in the project, we discussed Responsive Web Design at length. From an editorial and product perspective, it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want their content adapting to a device their reading it on? Who wants to pinch-zoom again and again? From a business and product perspective, we’ve seen this from multiple clients who want to take advantage of certain interactions on certain devices — swiping for example — for users to better engage with the content in a more native way. All good. And then advertising comes along and things get challenging.

Really great post on the pitfalls of integrating advertising in responsive sites. Seems like this could well take a lot of time to fix properly – most sites just don’t have the leverage with their advertising provider to be able to shift their advertising around.

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ExtendNY - New York City Extended

The Manhattan Grid extended to every point on earth

So awesome.

I’m on 63,741 st and 10,869 Ave. Taxi fair to Williamsburg might be a bit much from here though.

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Sting’s iPad app cost “in the low seven figures” to develop

Earlier this week, we reported on the launch of Sting 25, an iPad app celebrating Sting’s solo career. But how much did it cost to make? More than one million dollars. This is according to the Wall Street Journal.

The app itself – if you’re a Sting fan – is pretty nice, but over $1million to develop is just plain ridiculous. A quick glance at the credits – which is several pages long – tells you why: when you involve big agencies, they’re very good at spending your money.

I find it interesting that Chevrolet and AmEx feel they are getting enough value from having their logos slapped on the splash page to finance such an endevour (assuming that is that they’re together stumping the cost). By then, sponsorship is the only way to go if you’re spending that much money on an app like this as you sure as hell aren’t going to sell 100,000 copies at $9.99.

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Google+ Launches Pages, Opens Floodgates For Brands (And Everything Else)

And then there’s the feature that leads to my biggest gripe: Pages have both a +1 button and an ‘Add to Circles’ button. The latter is what permits the Page to start sending you updates. And the +1 button? It does essentially nothing, at least as far as users are concerned.

It’s not exactly surprising that Google have launched brand pages for Google+ but I do find it pretty surprising that they seem so bandy thought through. They seem to be the bare minimum that they could have launched with, which would be fine if there wasn’t a very developed alternative dominating the market already.

I have my concerns as well over the inevitable land grab that will happen as soon as everyone can make these brand pages; one of the big things they’re pushing is the integration with Google search, but I really don’t want a Google+ brand page showing up as one of the top results for one of our artists (as it’s almost the last place I’d want people to go) – to the point that actually, maybe it’s worth steering clear for that reason alone.

Checking my Google+ feed now shows the last post as being from 4 days ago, and if I go 10 posts down it’s almost a month ago. I have pretty much the same set of people loaded into it as I do on Facebook, and the latest activity there is 2 minutes ago. I do wonder where Google is going to go with this…

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Grand Theft Auto V Trailer

The Grand Theft Auto series is probably my favourite set of games released by any single developer; not so much for the violence, but for the storytelling and amazing open world gameplay (without tying it down to anything tedious like levelling up or any of that rubbish).

This trailer for GTA V (which is confusing the 7th full GTA game, confusingly) looks pretty amazing to me; yes, it’s not exactly a radical departure – I know some people are disappointed it’s not in a new setting, maybe one outside US – but for me that’s not the point; the location will be actually different, with different things to find, but most importantly with a different story (and it does look like a different take this time, as it’s seems to be eschewing the “work up from the bottom” storyline the last few have employed).

I’ve written previously about how games are their own art form, and I think the GTA series is one of the perfect examples of that. Interactive storytelling, without skimping either on the “interactive” or the story.

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St. Vincent 4AD Session

Recording these songs live for the first time, St Vincent has performed four tracks from Strange Mercy for the tenth visual installment in the 4AD Session series.

This is super awesome (click through for the full 4 track session):

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Two Key Features Of Facebook Music: Scrobbling And Track Unification

One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service.

I’m loath to speculate on rumoured products like this – who knows what it’ll actually be – but this sounds like it could be massive. Facebook is already the biggest single driver to artist websites, and this will just make it even more powerful.

It also – sorry to say – sounds like it could be the final blow for Last.fm; why have a social network just for music when the biggest social network has most of the features (that mainstream users want, at least).

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Amazon in Talks to Launch Digital-Book Library

Amazon.com Inc. is talking with book publishers about launching a Netflix Inc.-like service for digital books, in which customers would pay an annual fee to access a library of content, according to people familiar with the matter.

Or: Spotify for Books.

I think I’ve blogged before how I think this is a potential killer product; people only read (most) books once, so a rental model rather then a ownership model makes way more sense.

There’s also nothing stopping them replicating the ad-supported free service as well, or how about you get a year’s free service when you buy a Kindle? Could be very interesting indeed.

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Sane RSS usage

RSS is a great tool that’s very easy to misuse. And if you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about 10 items per day, you’re probably misusing it. I don’t mean that you’re using it in a way it wasn’t intended — rather, you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you.1

You should be able to go on a disconnected vacation for three days, come back, and be able to skim most of your RSS-item titles reasonably without just giving up and marking all as read. You shouldn’t come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles.

I disagree with a lot of the points both Marco and Jacqui are making here – mostly that it’s possible to use RSS “wrong”. It’s akin to saying that everyone should stop using SMS as that can be distracting – it’s using your phone “wrong”.

I am a heavy RSS user, but I find it immensely useful. According to Google Reader I’m currently subscribed to 990 feeds and have read over 50,000 items in the last 30 days, but I find this in no way stressful or counter productive. I follow some feeds that average over 100 posts per day, and some that don’t even post once every month. You can use RSS this way, and in fact I’d argue that it’s the best source of news you could ever come up with.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t some good pieces of advice in their two articles. Firstly, I don’t check my feeds all day – that would be impossible. RSS is not twitter, and it’s not really best I don’t think for real time news (although you could use it for that if you wanted). What it’s best for is assembling a custom built newspaper of all your interests, or at least that’s how I treat it. Roughly 3 times a day – in the morning, at lunch and in the evening – I check my feeds, and skim through them exactly as I would a newspaper. The articles allude to a fear of marking all as read which is ridiculous – does any one really read a newspaper cover to cover, every word? RSS is the same, a source of interest to flick through and dip into, not to labour over like email.

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Apple's iTunes Match beta doesn't technically stream music

Despite evidence that appears to show streaming playback through iTunes Match, an Apple spokesperson confirmed to Peter Kafka of All Things D that content played from the service must first be "stored" on an iPhone or iPad. The service appears to be streaming because it begins playback instantly, but instead of true streaming it is downloading and storing the file while beginning simultaneous playback.

"Apple's system, as it's currently constructed, still requires users to keep stuff on their machine in order to play with it," the report said. Kafka speculated that files that are not "downloaded" through iCloud but still played will sit in a "temporary cache" on the machine.

The semantics of this are pretty ridiculous – every major streaming service works in the same way, using a local cache. iTunes Match is streaming just as much as Spotify is.

And it’s also not very surprising that iTunes Match does supports streaming – it’ll be interesting to see what other features it gains before it launches (my bet: a web based version of iTunes, alongside a whole new version on the desktop).

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Introducing geofences on Flickr!

Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. For example, you might want to create a geofence around the your “home” or “school” that only allows “Friends and Family” to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area. So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the default geo privacy you’ve designated for that hotspot.

This is great for two reasons 1) it’s an obviously useful but also nifty feature 2) Flickr is innovating again; I was getting worried that they might not have it in them any more.

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A Super Mario Bros version of Portal?!

Wow. Someone is making a video game featuring the original Super Mario Bros worlds but Mario is outfitted with a Portal gun. Watch the demo:

This looks amazing.

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Twelve steps for saving webOS

10) Make sure that webOS apps can also run on other platforms. That’s in the browsers of that platform, of course. User has nice webOS app and shows it to a friend who uses Android. User sends app via Bluetooth, friend can open and use it straight away in the Android browser. That is the true strength of the web platform; a strength you should capitalise on.

WebOS could become something really interesting if they went down this route (and truly live up to this name). Although – and people forget this – Apple is already quite a long way down this path. I find it a little odd when you see articles along the lines of “HTML5 breaks the App Store lock-in” and the like; maybe it does, but only because Apple lets it.

In fact, not only is Apple letting HTML5 apps work on iOS, they’re positively encouraging them by letting them work as proper apps and pushing ahead with WebKit developments (like hardware accelerated animations, for example) to make them work better then on any other mobile platform.

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The futility of QR codes on Tube adverts

Travelling on the London Underground ‘Tube’ recently I have noticed that more and more adverts have a QR code, I am not too sure if this is a recent phenomena or that I have been paying more attention as a number of the projects that I’ve been recently looking at are about the ‘web of no web’: the interface between the web and the real world. I am a big fan of progressive approaches to marketing, however, the more I thought about the phenomena, the greater the waste of time that it seemed to be.

The explosion of QR codes on adverts, almost all of which are completely useless, really does show how little some advertisers think through what they’re doing.

I particularly like the ones I regularly see on the large posters on the other side of the track on tube platforms, which are almost always too far away to work – are you supposed to jump onto the rails to scan a QR code to visit some movies Facebook page? And that’s ignoring the fact that it’s displayed in one of the only places left 100% guaranteed not to have any form of internet connection…

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BBM Music aims to make song-sharing even more social for BlackBerry users

BBM Music will be a subscription service costing $4.99 a month in the US, although how that converts elsewhere in the world has yet to be announced. Users will choose 50 songs from the BBM Music catalogue for their profiles, which can be used to create playlists, and cached locally on their BlackBerry smartphone for offline listening.

50 songs? That's not much, but this is where the BBM angle kicks in. Users will also be able to access the 50 songs of any of their BBM contacts who subscribe to the service. That means a theoretical choice of 100 songs if one friend signs up, 200 songs if three do, and 2,000 songs if 39 do. And so on.

I can’t see this succeeding – the concept is just too complicated, and I can’t see the BBM user base (who primarily use it because it’s free) shelling out $5/month – but it’s certainly an interesting idea.

There’s a lot to be done in the area of ‘social music’ – this isn’t it (in the same way iTunes Ping wasn’t either) but it’s way more interesting then another iTunes clone, or another Spotify clone for that matter.

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Adapted

That left a third option, and it was after a few (decaf) lattes and advice from Ethan, that I decided the best thing to do was compromise for now. Let’s keep the same content and code that’s been powering the large-screened version that Dribbble has always been, and then let’s do something adaptive to it—using media queries to effectively make the site fluid and as vertical as possible when rendered at 480px wide and smaller. In other words, let’s take a step towards a responsive design by crafting an adaptive stylesheet that overrides the master to make things usable and readable on phones and small-screened things. Our tiny team can continue to maintain just one codebase.

A good reminder that even if – because of constraints that probably apply to 99% of web projects – you can’t do everything perfectly, doing a bit is better then nothing.

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