Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

July 17th, 2007 Davis

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was a site that got in early, on the Podcasting craze. Podcast Alley was quick to recognize that people wanted to express themselves via radio and from the start, they built their community around these content creators. Whether it’s been interviewing other podcasters, highlighting some of the best podcasts out there, or creating forums for fans to interact in, they’ve done a great job of creating a positive environment where podcasters can share information and ideas.

One of the things I love about the web 2.0 revolution, has been how multidimensional it’s made media. When the net first started, we saw flashes of what would come, but it was nothing like I expected. There was an occasional audio or video clip, but the quality was substandard and there was no interaction.

Now we have whole social communities that form around content. As the barriers to entry have been lowered, we’ve seen a proliferation of individuals who are eager to contribute in one way or another. I knew that one day, radio and video would make it’s way to the internet, but I didn’t expect a social revolution to drive it. It hasn’t happened overnight, but YouTube is disrupting TV, blogging is taking over the newspapers and podcasts are displacing radio.

People say that content is king, but when you have such a large explosion of information, content quickly becomes commoditized and it’s the businesses that can make sense of it, that become the new king. This gives the aggregators a lot more control, than the professional content creators like to admit.

I don’t normally listen to a lot of podcasts, but I do enjoy the format. Many of them are just as good as talk radio, except instead of mindless banter, I get to hear them talk about things that I’m actually interested in. This weekend, I had an opportunity to listen to Podflix’s review of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series.

Having recently watched the entire series, I was thrilled to be able to listen in on a bunch of guys, who enjoy talking about zombies eating people’s entrails. I know that not everybody is into horror films, but I love them and that is the beauty of podcating. What other’s consider amateur content, is A level material to someone who is interested. The key is matching up the listener’s interest with the content creators. Podcast Alley does a great job at this.

Congratulations to Podcast Alley for winning this week’s site of the week award. If you would like to nominate a site, feel free to send me an email. The nominations for next week’s contest are listed below. You can make your vote in the sidebar.

McAfee’s Site Advisor

No Phone Trees

Candy Wrapper Museum

Posted in Site Of The Week, Technology, Music, Media, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

June 25th, 2007 Davis

(Warning Song is NSFW)

The winner of this week’s site of week award was the innovative music site, iJigg. What makes iJigg so unique is that unlike sites like Pandora or Last FM, they let you find music in a more social environment. Artists are encouraged to upload their tracks to the service, where users can vote and comment on the ones that, they think are the best. Just like Digg, the more votes a song gets, the closer to the home page it gets.

The site is still very young, they only had their beta launch last December, but already their traffic is going in the right direction. This really is a very unique way to find music. By interacting with real people, instead of a recommendation service, it opens up possibilities to find things way off the beaten path.

One of the other cool things about iJigg, is that the site isn’t just for North American listeners. They support Portuguese, French, Japanese, Thai, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, German, as well as other languages. Users can either filter songs for certain languages or you can use the global language support, to find music that is good, even if you can’t understand the lyrics.

I was able to find a little bit of mainstream content on the site, but overall, it looked pretty clean. iJigg has a feature where people can report copyright infringement and they take the song down. When I first checked out the service there was a great mash up of Modest Mouse’s Float On and The Beastie Boys, but by the time I had gotten registered, they had already removed it. Not knowing whether or not content will be there later on is kind of a drag, but I can appreciate iJigg’s efforts to keep the site on the up and up, even though they depend on user submissions.

I just wish that the studios would quite freaking out about the mashups and realize the promotional value it can have, when people discover an old song all over again.

Overall, iJigg has created a very impressive set of tools that you can use to find new music. The community is developing nicely and already it’s a fun place to hang out. Even though, I’d like to see more mainstream content in the search results, I’m just as happy to find artists who are still trying to make it and who appreciate the extra attention. There really is a lot of amazing independent music out there and it’s neat to see a site that is helping them connect to eager listeners.

Congratulations to iJigg on winning this week’s award. You can check out their blog here. If you’d like to nominate a site for site of the week, feel free to send me a link and I’ll be happy to check it out. The nominees for next week’s award are listed below. Please vote in the sidebar.

50 States In Ten Minutes

I Love Music Video

Indeed.Com - One Search, All Jobs

Posted in Site Of The Week, Technology, Music, Media, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Car

May 2nd, 2007 Davis

Posted in Music, VOD | No Comments »

Say Goodbye To Spring

April 24th, 2007 Davis

Posted in Music | No Comments »

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

February 23rd, 2007 Davis

Guitars Hosted on Zooomr

As a music fan, I always enjoy checking out new bands and learning more about the bands I already follow. For years, I’ve pretty much exclusively used All Music Guide for my music information needs, but last year I came across this week’s winner of the site of the week contest and have found it to be even more helpful then AMG.

Like AMG, MusicPortl is a site that tracks information about bands, but unlike AMG, they rely on the fans to help populate their data. By pulling in information from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr and music videos from YouTube, MusicPortl has become a one stop shop for learning about your favorite bands. One of the features I like best is their similar artists browse field that helps me to find new bands that may be of interest. MusicPortl also pulls in feeds from Technorati and LastFM to compliment the information they already have.

The overall site design is very clean and contains limited advertisements. Because the site relies on Javascript and Ajax for most of their content, it loads very quickly and creates a dynamic environment where the information is constantly changing.

MusicPortl also offers a Firefox and IE plugin that allows you to add their site to the search bar in your browser. This is especially helpful if you tend to look up a lot of bands on the fly.

While MusicPortl has come a long way considering it was launched less then a year ago, there are still a few more features I’d like to see added. Right now the site doesn’t scrape the web for lyrics to songs, which would be a great service to offer. It also doesn’t incorporate photos from sites like Zooomr or videos from sites other then YouTube. It would be great to see an even more diversied pool of resources for them to draw upon. As the site continues to develop, I’m sure that we will see more features added, but even without this support, MusicPortl is still a pretty slick site. Congratulations to MusicPortl on winning this week’s site of the week award.

The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. If you’d like to nominate you own site for the site of the week, feel free to send me an email at Davis (@) DavisFreeberg Dot Com and it will be considered for nomination.

Tacky Postcards

Falling Sand

Drive-In Theater

Posted in Site Of The Week, Technology, Music, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Star Wars In The Hood

February 1st, 2007 Davis

This highly entertaining NSFW mashup combines Star Wars with gangsta rap in an East vs. West rivalry between the rebellion and the dark side of the force that any true geek would absolutely love. There is also a second mashup floating around out there that is even more NSFW, but still worth checking out, especially if you ever wondered what Star Wars would have been like, had Spike Lee been hired to direct the film.

Posted in Music, VOD | No Comments »

Sonific Extends Songspot Technology To Email

December 1st, 2006 Davis

Sonific launched an update to their website this week, that allows consumers to go beyond just being able to embed music into their blogs, MySpace and Facebook pages and to actually let them email the songs to people they know.

I tested out the email functionality earlier this week and had a lot of fun because I could find songs that either fit the personalities of my friends or songs that were comically related to topics we were discussing. When you email a song to someone, you give them your name, the email where you want it sent and a message to go along with the music. When your friend gets the email all they have to do is hit play and they can read your message while rocking out to the tune you selected.

I think that this is a big development for Sonific because it really makes the site much more appealling to a broader audience. According to a recent study, only 7.5% of all internet users actually run a blog compared to my own unscientific research, that 100% of all internet users have an email account.

Sonific is basically a different way for consumers to get access to music. They let you stream, on demand, any song from their catalog of 40,000 artists. This is much different then most internet radio that will only give you limited control over what you want to hear. The idea is that by not treating their customers like criminals, people might actually discover new bands and want to share them with their friends or buy an album to download.

While the site doesn’t have many of the top artists that have signed with the major studios, it does have a great collection of lesser known artists that are still fun to explore. There are also a few better known artists, who would rather share then try and squeeze their fans for a couple of extra nickels. Because the content can be a little obscure, by incorporating the email functionality right next to where you listen to the songs, it makes it all that much more convenient for people to share new bands with their friends, as soon as they find cool music.

I suspect that Forbes 9th richest fictional person would have a field day with the technology if he could ever figure out how to automate it, but if Prince Abakaliki of Nigeria ever finds the site, I’ve already found the perfect song for him to use in his emails, where he so generously allows others to help him disperse of his father’s fortune.

Posted in Technology, Music, Media | No Comments »

Stuck Inside Of Web 1.0 With the Web 2.0 Blues Again

November 16th, 2006 Davis

Ten years ago, my favorite possesion was my CD collection. I had spent years collecting, sorting and listening to music and whenever my friends would come by, I always delighted in showing them how extensive my collection was.

Whether it was the mainstream hits or the classics, somewhere in my collection there was a song for whatever mood I happened to be in. At that time, most of my collection stemmed from countless hours spent bargain hunting at independent record shops or from massive binge buying from CD clubs like BMG and Columbia House. As my collection grew, I found that storing them became an escalating problem and remember having to spend more money on a CD storage rack then in on any other piece of furniture I owned at the time.

This collection was never cheap and it took many years to build up, but it was a labor of love and one of my favorite things to do would be to continually reorganize the collection either alphabetically, categorically or chronologically. Like an old miser who delights in counting his gold, I would continually flip through one CD after another even if there was never enough time to listen to them all.

Somewhere along the way technology developed though and it rendered my CD collection useless.

It started with Napster where I learned that I didn’t need physical CDs. I could suddenly build up a digital database of songs and by the time I realized how easy it was to convert my legal CD collection into mp3’s, things quickly evolved into a full scale ripping project.

As my ripping project moved forward I quickly learned that I was going to need space. Just like I needed a CD case to store my albums, I needed external hard drives to store my mp3s. My first external drive was a 200 GB drive that I thought would last me for a couple of years at least. When 200 GBs turned out to be inadequate, I added more and more and more drives until I eventually had over a terrabyte of storage dedicated to my storing my mp3s.

It wasn’t until I got a few years into this process that I began to realize that I had made a big mistake by embracing the hot 1.0 technology of the day. The hard drives turned out to be nothing but problems. In the last few years, I’ve had at least five hard drive failures and while three of those were still under their 1 year warranty, getting the data back was about as much fun as being the one stuck with having to clean Alice Cooper’s hotel room after a concert.

After a couple of data failures I learned to start backing up my music, but after constant I/O device errors and continually being prevented from backing up my music by what I suspect were DRM laced music files, I finally gave up on trying to save multiple copies of my mp3 files.

Because of the size of my collection, I could never get any music players to effectively manage the entire thing. Whether it was using Media Player, iTunes or Winamp, every system seemed unable to respond after I would import the collection into their software. To make matters worse, everytime my computer crashed, I could never prevent my external drives from trying to autoplay the entire collection everytime I restarted.

While I’ve loved having an extensive music collection, my problem now though, is that over the last few years technology has innovated so fast that we’ve moved from a web 1.0 world to a web 2.0 world and I’ve been left behind.

Just like my CD collection is largely irrelevant today, my mp3 collection has become less relevant by the shift toward networked solutions. This fact was highlighted to me when I was reading a great review of the Sonos music system, which Joel Spolosky titled “The Infinite Music Collection.”

By combining a wifi Sonos sound system with a Rhapsody music service, Joel has been able to replicate my entire music collection (and more) without the headaches of hard drive failures, loss of data or buffer overrun issues.

In retrospect, had I been able to think forward five years, I would have been better off putting off innovation and using Rhapsody (or more likely Yahoo! music because Real Network sucks), then to try and assemble a collection on my own.

Of course there are downsides to a web 2.0 solution. Because you don’t own the music it’s more difficult to share it or move it onto other consumer electronic products, because the all you can download services are subscription based, you have never ending fees instead of a one time purchase, and of course there will always be DRM restrictions associated with these services, but given the amount of time and money I’ve spent on my music collection, I think I would have been much better off renting 2 million songs, instead of trying to build my own music catalog.

Posted in Technology, Music, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

How To Take Sonific From Good To Terrific

November 13th, 2006 Davis

Over the last few months I’ve been playing around with the music site Sonific. The site has signed agreements with over 40,000 artists that allow people to listen and to share their catalog with their readers. Unlike the studio fat cats, Sonific understands that by allowing people to share quality music, it directly benefits the artists involved by selling more mp3s, concert tickets and increasing their brand band exposure.

As a fan of anyone who is willing to think outside the box, I’ve been impressed with Sonific’s flexibility and the catalog that they offer to their users. I do however, have a few suggestions that I think would improve the service.

First off, I’ve found that embeding their songs can be a bit obnoxious. In order to embed a song into a blog post, I must first publish the post and then give the specific location where the song will be published. This contrasts with the more blog friendly approach that YouTube takes, where they give you the embeded code up front, without requiring that you register or specify the destination. This is a small thing, but it’s still annoying to have to identify where I’m going to put a song before I actually put the song into a post.

My second complaint though is that the licensing of the songs doesn’t go far enough. It’s great that I can go to the site and listen to any of the songs on demand and that I can embed an original song into my website, but I still don’t have the authorization to use any of the songs in a podcast. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but without legal access to the music, it means that any podcast I do would just be boring chat instead of good independent rockin music. It would be great if Sonific could clear the digital music rights for me to incorporate their music into any podcast that I wanted to do.

While I understand that Sonific can’t just give me carte blanche access to incorporate their songs into any webcast, I think that they could create a program allowing podcasters to upload their programs directly to Sonific’s website and then use the songs in their podcast from there. These could either be clips of the songs that lead into interviews and show promos or they could be the whole song with a skip forward button that would allow listeners to skip past any songs they didn’t particularly care for.

If I had the ability to upload a podcast to Sonific, it would not only add to their content by creating a platform for independent podcasters to build on, but it would also give greater exposure to the artists who show up in the shows because it would mean that each song featured would likely get an endorsement, in addition to internet radio exposure.

By extending their digital agreements beyond just a single song and into a set of songs, Sonific could open up “traditional radio” programs to anyone who has the desire to sort through their 40,000 artist list and highlight songs that they enjoy. I’m not sure how they’d embrace downloading of the podcasts, but maybe they could create a program where users could pay a small fee if they wanted to download vs. stream a show.

While this wouldn’t allow me to add some of the more mainstream songs into my radio show, it would still give me a pretty big resource to pull music from and would make Davis Freeberg’s Midnight Hour one step closer to becoming a reality.

Posted in Music, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

GigaOm Launches Blogcott Against Universal

November 13th, 2006 Davis

There has been a pretty negative reaction to Microsoft’s announcement that they will start paying a $1 sin tax to Universal Music Group on all Zune sales, but super blogger Om Malik has taken the rhetoric one step further and has declared a one week blogcott on all UMG purchases. His boycott stems from seeing yet another comment by Universal where they accuse their customers of being theives.

I’m all for supporting GigaOm on this one. Universal’s tax on the Zune is going to be passed directly onto consumers and as someone who doesn’t steal music, it’s hardly fair for me to pay this tax just because Microsoft wants to offer the ability to play mp3s that I’ve legitimately ripped from my own collection. I’ve paid for my music once already and if Universal wants me to pay for my music a second time, then they can kick rocks for all I care.

Universal can spin this anyway they want, but Microsoft did the tech community a major disservice by agreeing to pay this tax and Universal’s continued rhetoric on the issue show just how wide the rift between the media and their customers really is.

If Universal wants to call me a thief that’s their right, but for the next week I’m going to support Om by showing Universal what it’s like when the “theives” stop buying their music and I would encourage my readers to join in on this boycott as well.

I’m also going to take this one step further by not only boycotting any music purchases, but I will also refuse to watch any of their films or TV shows during this period.

This may mean that I’ll have to go without seeing Heroes or checking out the new movie, Let’s Go To Prison, but I’d rather miss out on this entertainment, then to be the biggest loser and support a company that would rather call their customers theives then try to adapt to the new digital landscape.

The internet has changed the music and film industry forever. The studios may not be ready to change, but instead of dragging their feet on the digital revolution, they should be working with technology to enhance the experience for everyone involved. Consumers have more options now and if they won’t fill those options we’ll find someone who will. Universal Music Group may own a third of the music out there, but I’d much rather support an independent label where the artist makes more selling a $10 CD then to spend my hard earned money on a corporate machine that sucks the soul out of musicians and then accuses their customers of being the ones that are stealing.

Posted in Music, Movies, Media | No Comments »