With access to four tuners and 1.5 terrabytes of storage, I thought that I had the ultimate DVR setup, but after seeing Snapstream’s Enterprise DVR in action, my home entertainment system suddenly seems wimpy. This DVR isn’t meant for the home market, but I can’t help being envious of its capabilities. I don’t know how much Snapstream is charging, but if money grew on trees, I would be all over this in a heartbeat.
With 10 tuners, you won’t need to worry about programming conflicts and with 2 terrabytes of storage, it would mean that you could record 10 different channels, 24 hours a day for at least 8 days before you would have to worry about archiving. Even, if you did need to save old content, the software allows you to back up your videos onto DVD.
While the specs started me drooling, the search capabilities were what I found most impressive. By taking advantage of the closed captioning system, SnapStream is able to search the transcripts of any program you record. This allows you to record a lot of junk and filter it for the information that you care about. Unlike the DVR in your living room, this isn’t limited to one monitor. SnapStream has designed the DVR to act as a server, which allows multiple users to search and stream videos from anywhere connected to the network.
In the video demoing the product, Snapsteam CEO Rakesh Agrawal mentions that they have PR firms, political organizations, schools and pro sport teams as customers. While I could see how all of these organizations could benefit from access to this type of technology, I was surprised to see Wall St. missing from this list. Being able to keep track of when an investment is mentioned in the media, would be a powerful tool for money managers. When you consider that Thomson is booking a billion a year in profits, by selling market data to businesses, you have to imagine that there is a market for searchable video intelligence. SnapStream may be tapping into a niche market, but it can be a lucrative one, if they attract motivated buyers. By helping businesses make better use of DVR technology, they are filling a market void and creating demand for an entirely new DVR product category.
SnapStream’s professional DVR may be well outside of my tax bracket, but it’s still exciting to see the company innovate. Considering the stiff competition in the consumer DVR market, it makes sense for them to diversify into the professional segment. You can read more about SnapStream’s enterprise ambitions in Brent Evans’ recent interview with Agrawal.
In the filing I didn’t find any bombshells or new lawsuits, but there were a few details on some of DivX’s recent acquisitions that did reward my curiosity. According to the filing, DivX made two purchases over the last quarter.
“In May 2007, the Company made an equity investment in a private corporation that aggregates and distributes art via its web community and facilitates an open forum where artists can exhibit their artwork and build community around that art in an effort to drive commerce. The Company’s investment consisted of $3.5 million cash for which it received certain shares of the private corporation’s Series A Preferred Stock and entered into an advertising and marketing agreement. The Company has preliminarily allocated approximately $650,000 of the investment to the advertising and marketing agreement, based on its estimated fair value, and the remaining $2.9 million will be carried as an investment.”
DivX doesn’t name the actual artwork site in their filing, but since I already knew that they had purchased a piece of DeviantArt, this one wasn’t hard to figure out. Originally, I had thought that they were only partially behind the $3.5 million investment, but according to the filing, it looks like they put in all of the cash. DivX doesn’t disclose how much of a stake they got for their money, but they do disclose that it is less than 20%.
Without knowing the details behind the acquisition, it’s hard to determine whether DivX received good value for their money, but from a strategy standpoint, I really liked the acquisition. There are a lot of websites that can build a lot of traffic, but the question is at what cost. Newspaper websites get a ton of hits, but take away their print business and the business model can’t support the cost of writers, editors, staff, etc.
The great part about user generated content is that because it’s built around community, the customers are the ones that provide the content. In the case of DeviantArt, they’ve built a very positive environment around people who love art and by connecting artists together in this way they’ve been able to develop a community where creativity thrives.
If DivX wanted to sell art they could have spent $3.5 million on Google Adwords and bought the traffic, but they weren’t interested in selling art, they wanted access to the artists themselves. Through their investment, they will not only get access to DeviantArt’s traffic, but they’ll get the right kind of traffic visiting Stage6, content creators who are looking for venues to showcase their digital creativity. The acquisition won’t do anything to bolster their bottom line, but it does further connect them to the larger web community.
The second acquisition in the 10-Q was a little bit harder to figure out. It’s related to improving the search functionality of Stage6, but DivX didn’t release a lot of details on whose technology they actually purchased.
“In July 2007, the Company acquired all of the assets of a limited liability corporation engaged in real-time digital video processing for the purposes of producing enhanced video search and discovery services. The total purchase price for the acquisition is up to $4.25 million comprised of an initial upfront cash payment of $2.0 million, which the Company made in July 2007, and subsequent cash payments up to $2.25 million upon the achievement of certain technology related milestones. The Company will account for the acquisition as an asset purchase and periodically review for impairment.”
Without knowing whose technology they bought, it’s hard to get a feel for how powerful their new search will be, but I’m glad that they are taking steps to improve their search functionality. Search on Stage6 is one of the many areas that is still in “beta” mode. Sometimes you’ll find what you want, but it’s usually more by luck than query. I’d describe the issues in greater detail, but Neillithan has made a video that addresses the deficiencies better than I ever could.
As Stage6’s media collection continues to grow, relevant video search will be crucial in helping to make sense of it all. Searching by tags and keywords works for now, but it’s far from perfect. I don’t think anyone has perfected video search, but EveryZing is the furthest along and even they still have high failure rates on their speech to text functionality.
One of the frustrating parts about finding details is that they rarely answer more questions than they raise. While I was pleased to find out more about DivX’s search solution, without knowing who they actually acquired, it’s hard to determine how important this could be.
I have a theory about who DivX may have picked up, but I have to qualify it as even more speculative than my normal unreliable gut feelings. It’s really nothing more than a wild guess based upon the criteria that they lay out. Still, I’ve never been one to be shy about speculating even when I’m probably wrong, so here is my wild guess on who DivX may have acquired.
Of all of the companies that fit this criteria, Veatros seems the most likely candidate to me. Their site went offline in July, but before it went down, I know that they were looking for strategic partnerships for their search technology. One of their former employees, has his resume up on LinkedIn and I thought it was interesting to see him leave around the same time that a DivX acquisition would be taking place. According to his LinkedIn profile, he describes Veatros as having the fastest video search ever developed.
“Startup technology company spinning out of the University of Kansas with the fastest video search technology ever developed. Veatros technology can identify a video clip of as little as 2-3 seconds in length from a database of tens of thousands of hours in real-time.”
Susan Gauch is the owner of Veatros and she would certainly have the expertise to implement video search on Stage6. Veatros is really a side project for her, during her day job,she is an accomplished professor at the University of Kansas. Her entire career has been dedicated to researching and improving search. Her research has already been referenced in several video search related patents.
There’s no way for me to be sure if my guess is right, but if it’s not Veatros, then I would suspect that it would a company with similar characteristics. Irregardless of who the mysterious LLC turns out to be, improving their search is something that I’m glad to see DivX focusing on. Better content filters, mean a better experience for anyone visiting their site. If they can personalize video search, then the content on Stage6 will keep getting better.
Neither one of these acquisitions is a major move on DivX’s part, but it does give us some insight into part of DivX’s growth strategy. The video search investment makes sense from a tactical standpoint, but the DeviantArt purchase is far more interesting.
The passive nature of the investment raises the possibility that DivX is developing a venture capital arm to their business. They’ve already incubated Stage6 and with steady cash flow coming in each quarter, Divx is in a great position to make private investments where they see opportunities. It’s too early to know how aggressively DivX will pursue this aspect of their business, but if they continue to invest in emerging technology, things could certainly start to get interesting.
Update - It looks like my wild guess turned out to be right, but I may have been wrong about how they plan on implementing it. DivX released a press release this afternoon confirming that Veatros was in fact the company that they had acquired. In the press release, DivX says that their plan is to integrate the technology into their connected platform. Interestingly enough, they don’t mention Stage6 once in the release . . .
It looks like TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster will be packing their bags for Massachusetts, after they won the first of many legal scrimmages in their patent defense against Lycos. Lycos has asserted that all three companies have violated patents they own, on “information filtering technology.” The twopatents that are at the heart of the case are related to the recommendation services that the companies provide.
After Lycos filed their lawsuit against the trio, ChoiceStream (the company that created Blockbuster’s suggestion service) filed a separate lawsuit, to have the patents thrown out.
In their lawsuit against Lycos, they argue that the patents are invalid because of obviousness and prior art. Because Choicestream filed their own lawsuit in the Massachusetts’ court system, TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster sought to have their case transferred there as well. I’m not familiar enough with the legal subtleties to know why Lycos originally opposed the motion, but with Lycos’ headquarters in MA, the judge found the request reasonable enough and granted the motion.
While this development in the case, is only a minor footnote in the larger dispute, the legal filing did contain more background on the case, as well as a few interesting side details.
It turns out that Choicestream may actually end up playing a pretty important role in how this gets resolved. In the legal filing the judge writes,“ChoiceStream has employees in Massachusetts who possess information relevant to this action, and Lycos has indicated that it ‘may need to take some discovery from ChoiceStream.’”
I haven’t read ChoiceStreams lawsuit against Lycos yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did end up owning some prior art. A year ago, they filed an application for their own recommendation patent, so it will be interesting to see what ends up coming out at trial.
It also appears MIT’s Media Lab could be called to give testimony. Part of their research was used to reject some of the original claims on one of Lycos’ patents. Believe it or not, they’ve actually been publishing research on “information filtering” since the late 80’s.
While it appears that this case is heading for trial, there is always the possibility of a settlement. Even though Lycos filed their lawsuit on Jan. 3, they didn’t actually serve TiVo, Netflix or Blockbuster until April 30th because they were engaged in “settlement discussions” with the companies. Since they now appear to be squabbling over who gets home court advantage, those talks have likely cooled off, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see either side at the bargaining table, especially if things start to look bad for them.
Over the last few months, I’ve seen a ton of freecreditreport.com ads on TV and on the net. I’m not sure if there is a seasonality to the credit business or if the ramp up in ads is just a new push by their parent company, Experian, but it’s clearly working. For the month of June, Nielsen Net Ratings estimates that FreeCredit had 3.3 million unique visitors.
On top of the number of unique hits, their average visit was over 9 minutes long. To help put these numbers into perspective, the site was able to generate 3 times as many unique visitors as Google finance and was able to capture 4 times as long of an impression as About.com.
Considering that they charge $40, for all three reports, this looks like a good racket to be in on. What I can’t understand though, is why anyone would pay anything, when the credit agencies are required by law, to provide you with a copy of your report anyway. All you have to do is go to ANNUALcreditreport.com, input your information and in less than five minutes, you’ll have easy access to your credit history. No messy credit card charges, no auto renewal, just one free copy on demand, from each agency, once a year.
When you log into the site, you’ll have the choice of looking at any or all, of the three credit agencies. If you are considering taking out a loan or making a big purchase, I’d definitely check all three. If all you want to do, is keep an eye on your history, instead of paying FreeCreditReport $12.95 to give you unlimited access, set appointments on your calendar, to check a different agency, every four months. This enables you to keep a quasi-close eye on your credit, without having to pay Experian $150 a year, to make sure that they don’t screw up.
If you haven’t checked your credit score in a long time, I’d take advantage of the real free report and make sure that things still look OK. There is a lot of identity theft out there and it’s important to fix things quickly, so that it doesn’t threaten your access to capital in the future. There are also many interesting little details in the report, that make it worth checking out.
When I looked at my most recent report, it was really fascinating to look at all of the different addresses, of places where I’ve lived. In total, they are tracking 23 different locations for me, but I know that they are missing at least 2 places where I lived off the grid. Since I will be moving in 2 weeks, it should put my count at 26 shortly. Some people prefer to stay put in life, but my philosophy has always been that a rolling stone gathers no moss.
While AnnualCreditReport doesn’t get the sexy “free” domain name or the marketing budget of a company like Experian, it is a much smarter way to keep track of what businesses know about you. You may not be able to stop companies from reporting on your every move, but you at least have some rights for making sure they get the details right.
If you’ve ever tried to contact a business for technical or customer support, then you know exactly how frustrating it can be, when you are trying to get a hold of a live agent. Sometimes, the automated phone systems may have the info. that you need, but 9 times out of 10, I’ve found that it’s easier to ask someone a direct question, than to navigate through a maze of options.
One trick that I learned to use, a long time ago, is to immediately hit *0 and sometimes it will take me to a live operator. Other times, it will disconnect my call and send me back to zero, so I always try this early on in the call and phone back, if I need to.
Mashing buttons into my phone, in order to get to the right department for a company, is a little annoying, but not as bad as the voice activated systems. Half the time, they can’t understand me and if you don’t use their keywords exactly, it’s easy to get reset back to the beginning of the menu. The other half of the time, the system will understand me just fine, but I don’t want to share my password and the last four digits of my social security number with other people in my vicinity.
As technology continues its march forward, this has been one area where consumers have been forced to take a step back. Luckily, this week’s winner of the site of the week can help consumers take back control over phone queue hell.
NoPhoneTrees.com is a website that is devoted to tracking telephone numbers of live people at various companies. I’m not sure the total count, but they have contact information on everything from the California DMV to the Xbox customer support line.
In order to test the site, I decided to use it for a few companies that I’m a customer at. While I was able to get a hold of live agents who could assist me, a few of the times, I ended up in the wrong department. While it’s nice to have a hot line directly into a company like Schwab, it doesn’t really help me all that much, if my account information isn’t available to the person I’m calling.
With a little bit of research, I could probably track down the numbers directly, but having so many in one localized place makes it more convenient to go back to on a regular basis. Congratulations to No Phone Trees for making consumer’s lives easier and on winning this week’s contest. If you’d like to nominate a web page for site of the week, feel free to send me an email. The nominations for next week’s contest are listed below, please vote in the sidebar.
I have to admit that the first time I heard about Profilactic, I was a bit skeptical. After all, I already belong to 50 different social networks, but only have time to interact with half of them. While I like checking out new sites, there are also a lot of things that I sign up for, but forget about later. I didn’t know it at the time, but having to manage so many different social networks, is actually what makes Profilactic so useful to begin with.
When Shawn Morton told me that the site was going to be a place where you could create a profile to show your friends, I thought he was crazy. I mean after all, just about every web 2.0 site has someplace for you to write a quick bio. In my case, I’ve even got a blog where people can find out all kinds of information about me. I couldn’t see a reason why I would need to create a profile on a web 2.0 site, just to showcase my other profiles.
What I didn’t understand about Smorty’s plan though, was that he wasn’t talking about a static profile in the traditional sense. The site is not about what you’ve done or accomplished, it’s about what you are doing now and who are today.
Before I saw Profilactic, I could only think of someone’s profile as a quick bio with some links. I never thought about a profile being multidimensional, but what Smorty built was a dynamic profile that could display all of your day to day social activity on one website.
While conceptually, I couldn’t understand the appeal, after seeing it in action, I now have a different appreciation for how powerful Profilactic’s tools really are. Everytime I Digg a story, it lets people know. When I upload a video to YouTube or fav a photo on Zooomr, I can include that in my feed. Whether you are a MySpace fan or a Facebook user, Profilactic can take your identities there and fuse it into a more cohesive picture of your interests. It’s like Digg Spy, only for all of your social networks.
For every story that I blog about, there are at least 10 that I miss. Everyday, I find great content, but don’t have the time to give it the attention it deserves. Sometimes I will comment, sometimes I’ll bookmark or Digg the site hoping to come back and write about it later. Sometimes, I just find strange tidbits that I’m not really sure where to file.
Normally, these stories would fall through the cracks, but Profilactic allows me to set up a feed, so that people who are interested, can see other parts of my online life. Not everybody will be interested in what I’m doing, but for those who care about what happens away from DavisFreeberg.com, you can now track the various sites and links that I come across online.
As a blogger, I’m probably more interested than the general population in expressing myself online, but I recognize that a lot of people would rather listen in the shadows than stand in the limelight. While I can appreciate being able to build a central profile to share with my friends, there are also a lot of people who have no interest in sharing information about themselves.
While on the surface, you wouldn’t think that Profilactic would appeal beyond the exhibitionist crowd, it’s ability to track other people’s social movement is actually very appealing to my voyeuristic side. The data feeds that you can create allow you access to information that would normally be impossible or pretty time consuming to get at. While I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing, if you want to cyberstalk someone, I know of few resources that offer more information about what someone is up to.
Intellectually, I know that nothing I do online is a secret, but sometimes it’s easy to forget how much information you really give up. Forget about needing someone’s social security number, with Profilactic, the user name is what’s most important. In an information age, this is both exciting and terrifying. On one hand, I could see this being very useful for keeping tabs on certain key people or even as a social network filter for certain topics or companies that I am interested in.
On another hand though, I’m not sure how comfortable I would be, if someone I didn’t get along with, was using it to track me. While I like having the ability to watch other people’s social activity, when it comes to actually being watched, I feel differently about it. It’s not fair to have a double standard, but it’s part of my human nature I guess.
Even though all of the data that Profilactic uses is public, I’m not sure that I’d want an ex-girlfriend to be able to watch all of my social activity or see that I had set up an account on HotorNot.com. People already freaked out when we saw tools introduced, that could notify you if your MySpace crushes became single. Profilactic can take this to a new level.
If you actually think about the amount of information that you give away online, it’s a little bit scary. If I upload a photo to Zooomr and geotag it, someone will know the date, time and location of where I was when I took the photo. If I bookmark a recipe, then it would be easy to guess about what I’m having for dinner and whether it’s taco night with the guys or a romantic dinner. While most of this information is pretty harmless, in the context of a bad relationship, it could be a little awkward.
It took me a while to reconcile the part of me that sees Profilactic as an excellent data mining tool with the part of me that is concerned about it being a not so good date mining tool. Eventually though, I realized that all of this information is already out there and that part of being in a social community, means that for better or worse, people get to see what you are doing.
If I’m not comfortable with Profilactic, than I shouldn’t be anymore comfortable with Digg, Del.icio.us or Pandora, but all of these sites are valuable resources and sometimes sharing what I’m doing is the best part. When you combine these various web 2.0 services with Profilactic’s ability to filter and aggregate this activity, you can get a much more comprehensive look at someone’s personality. If I have a problem with something showing up there, than I probably shouldn’t have dugg some drunk stripper orgy story to begin with.
At the end of the day, Profilactic’s technology may be a little unnerving, but only because it shatters the false illusion that you actually have privacy and anonymity to begin with. There is a saying that if you can’t beat them, join them and in this case, I’d rather take advantage of the social networks than to hide from them. If Profilactic can make finding and sorting this information easier, than I am a fan, even if I do end up embarrassing myself once in a while.
This week’s winner of this site of the week contest was Indeed.com. Indeed is your typical job search engine, except on human growth hormones. Instead of of restricting their search to one job site, they aggregate many different jobs listings into one easy to use interface. This can be helpful in many ways.
If you are looking for a highly specific position, you can put in certain skills or keywords that describe what you are looking for and instead of focusing on one set of search results, you can compare a more diversified pool of options. I learned long ago, that different businesses react to technology in their own unique ways. Some businesses would rather advertise in the paper than on Monster.com. As a job searcher though, why pick one site, if you don’t have too?
I also liked Indeed.com for the data mining features it provides me as a blogger. There have been plenty of business decisions leaked through careless job listings and it’s something I check regularly on many of the companies I follow more closely.
One downside to Indeed.com is that I did not see any Craigslist listings on their engine. I’m not sure if this is related to licensing agreements or their business model, but the more sites that they can include, the better the results will be for job searchers. A lot of people think that content is king, but when there is so much information out there, sometimes it’s the companies that can make sense of it all, that succeed.
Congratulations to Indeed.com for winning this week’s site of the week contest. If you know of a good site, feel free to contact me and I will be happy to consider it for the pool of nominations. The nominees for next week’s award are listed below, you can vote in the sidebar.
This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was Every Stock Photo. Every Stock Photo is a site that is especially helpful if you happen to be a blogger, because it allows you to search Flickr, StockXchange and other photo sharing sites, for images that are available under the creative commons license.
I love the creative commons license because it allows me to use other people’s photos by giving them attribution for the work. The photo I used above for example, was originally taken by Grant Mitchell on Flickr. Some artists would prefer to lock down their content, but if someone wants to use Mitchell’s photo’s, he doesn’t mind sharing his content with the rest of the community.
All of my own photos have also been licensed under creative commons. Some artists might worry that other people will use their photos for free, but my opinion has always been, that there isn’t much value to my photos anyway, if other people don’t have an opportunity to see them to begin with. If someone wanted to use one of my photos in a marketing campaign, I’d probably request some type of payment, but if someone wants to share one of my photos with a larger audience, I certainly wouldn’t want to stop them from presenting my work.
Flickr also has a creative commons filter that you can use to find photos, but by default, their search field includes a lot of all rights reserved photos and it’s frustrating when you find a great photo, but someone doesn’t feel comfortable letting you use it.
Another perk of using Every Stock Photo, instead of Flickr directly, is that you can search more than just one service, for photos that people are willing to share. Currently, the site indexes over a million creative common photos, from a number of different sites.
Every Stock Photo is a great resource, but there are a few ways that they could improve the site. I’d like to see them add more sources to their filter. Right now the service relies pretty heavily on Flickr, but looking through the search results, I didn’t see any hits from Photobucket, Zooomr or Webshots. Because Flickr already offers their own creative commons content search, by adding extra sites, it would significantly enhance the value proposition of using Every Stock Photo’s portal instead.
The site also doesn’t offer much in the way of sorting photos. One of the cool things that you can do on Zooomr is sort photos by how awesome they are. Zooomr and Flickr both use an algorithm to figure out which photos are good and which ones are junk, but Every Stock Photo doesn’t seem to take interestingness into account. This makes it harder to find the best photos on the site, unless someone has specifically tagged the photo for the term that you are looking for.
Overall though, the positives of the site, more than make up for the negatives. There are a lot of people out there willing to share their photos with the rest of the world, but sometimes finding people open to sharing, can be more difficult than it’s worth. Every Stock Photo, helps you get around this problem by making sure that every photo you see, has already been approved for people to use on their own sites.
Congratulation to Every Stock Photo for winning this week’s site of the week contest. The nominations for next week’s site are listed below, you can vote in the sidebar. If you know of any good sites that should be considered for nomination, feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to check them out.
Over the last few years, Google has become essential to how I surf the web. Whether it’s their minimalistic advertising or their superior search results, Google has become a daily staple in my internet diet.
Last year, I signed up for Google’s personalized search program and after a year using the program, I’ve got to give it mixed results. This program has been a little bit controversial, because it allows Google to tie your search results to a unique profile.
Overall though, I don’t tend to worry too much about Google abusing this power and having access to filtered personalized search results, along with trend analysis on my queries, more than makes up for the small piece of my privacy that I have to give up.
In looking through my search stats, it wasn’t surprising to see TiVo and Netflix as my top two most requested results, but I was shocked to realize that I’ve searched Google over 22,000 times, in just the last year alone. The bulk of these searches were made during prime time television hours, which I found to be a little bit surprising. I’m not sure what it can tell me about my internet usage, but with 15,000 of my search queries coming during prime time hours, it highlights how much of an impact TiVo and the internet have had, on my television watching.
While Google’s personalization technology has largely improved my search experience, there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.
What I like about Google’s recommendations, is that it learns which sites I have a bias towards and will rerank my search results, according to my own personality. The downside to Google’s personalization program is that there is no way to tell Google, when they get a search woefully wrong.
The more powerful that Google has become, the more that people have tried to game the system. Whether it’s blackhat SEO tricks or coordinated Google bomb campaigns, it’s important to remember that Google’s results aren’t always unbiased. They can give a higher weighting to sites that you have already been to, but there is no way to tell them when a site is really search spam.
There are a lot of times that I am searching and an About.com article will pop up near the top. Now I know some people like the site, but I think About.com has to be one of the most worthless places on the net to find information. It is an ad factory that is highly dependent on Google for their profits. Google should give me a nuclear button that I can hit, that would permanetely ban About.com listings from any of my future search results. If enough users started banning a site, they could adjust their alogrithm to take into account the liklihood, that the result was really search spam.
Google’s About.com results are so bad, that someone actually took the time to write a Greasemonkey script, that will strip out the About.com results from Google, at the browser level. While this does offer me a way to remove About.com from my internet life, it’s really not a mass market solution and it doesn’t solve the countless other lame search results, that pollute what you’re really looking for.
I’m glad that Google is out there innovating and I see a lot of positive benefits to using their recommendation engine, but Google needs to do a better job of harnessing the power of their readers, to help make our search results even more relevant. Giving users the ability to blacklist a site from Google would be extreme, but with the SEO firms able to automate massive amounts of fake content, it is going to take the help of the masses, if Google wants to take control back.
The Hype Machine is one of the more controversial picks to win site of the week because, one of the many things that the site lets you do, is search and listen to pirated music on the internet. Hype Machine takes the position that they aren’t pirating themselves because they do not provide downloads to listeners, but they are rather just pointing streaming links to .mp3’s that other bloggers have loaded onto the internet.
Regardless of whatever ethically grey issues people have with the site, the Hype Machine is a great tool for finding new music and they really do encourage their listeners to support the bands by buying their music, if they like it. In addition to being able to stream many songs, you can also download an mp3 a crappy DRM infected file from either Amazon or iTunes, directly from the site. If you aren’t willing to pay for a DRM file, then the Hype Machine also lists upcoming performances for each band, so that you can support your favorite bands by seeing them live.
Hype Machine is a lot like TechMeme, only for .mp3s. They have a pretty extensive list of bloggers that regularly blog .mp3 files and whenever one of the bloggers adds a song, it automatically gets added to the front page of their site. Unlike Techmeme though, the hype machine actually tries to strip out the duplicate links to try and keep the site clean.
One bad part about the Hype Machine is that they only have .mp3’s and don’t do podcasts. Most people using the site are probably looking for music to begin with, but it would be neat to be able to see which podcasts were being talked about. It would help listeners better figure out which ones are worth taking the time to listen to and which ones we should take a pass on. There are of course other sites that specialize in podcasts, but personally, it’s a feature that I think that the Hype Machine should have.
Getting access to a bunch of great songs is cool, but one of my favorite parts of the Hype Machine is that they let you monitor the music by creating RSS feeds for bands or songs that you are looking for. This is a great tool for finding b-sides, covers or new music by your favorite artists. It also helps to serve as a good reminder to keep coming back and checking out the new stuff that shows up.
Congratulations to the Hype Machine on winning this shortened site of the week contest. The nominies for this week’s contest are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. Voting will close on Friday morning, so get you votes in early. If you have a site you’d like to nominate for the site of the week, send me an email to Davis AT davis freeberg . com and it will be considered for nomination.
