Dave Haynes

Back in Novmber 2007 I signed up for Tumblr. As with many new services I’d read some reviews of the site and signed up to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately it didn’t make sense for me. If I wanted to make a full blog post, then I could hear at www.bytesizemusic.net. If I wanted to microblog I could go use Twitter. Having stumbled across this post blog of Joe Lazarus. I’m glad to say however that I’ve now found a use for Tumblr. It’s My MP3 Tumbleblog!

A pinch of Last.fm, mixed with Yahoo Pipes and a dash of Seeqpod. All mixed in a Tumblr and served up with the Yahoo Music Player. The results are simple yet effective and show just what is achievable with today’s web services. So what’s happening exactly…

I’m scrobbling tracks to Last.fm and Yahoo Pipes finds MP3’s from the web matching the new songs you listen to via Seeqpod. Tumblr imports the songs via the resulting RSS feed and then anyone visiting my Tumblre can play the songs on your page using the Yahoo! Media Player.

Awesome. Go here for the recipe to make your very own MP3 Tumbleblog.

I’m a big fan of Paul Lamere’s blog Duke Listens, and it’s nearly always one of the first blogs I check in my reader each morning on my way into the office. I’ve never met him in person but it looks like he is doing some great work over at Sun Labs. So why am I telling you this? Well it’s because he’s coined one of my favourite new phrases ‘freakomendations‘.

(Music) Recommendation systems come in all shapes and sizes - a lengthy subject perhaps better left for another post - like many things in life some work better than others. But every now and then they turn up some very wrong yet mildly amusing results. When this happens you’re left with a freakomendation.

This is my favourite. iTunes suggests that if you like “Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears, you might like the “Report on Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq”.

For more freakomendations check out Paul’s excellent blog.

I nearly forgot to mention the newly founded OpenMusicMedia Meet here on my very own blog. OpenMusicMedia is a group that myself and Jonas Woost have setup to serve as a regular London-based meetup to discuss, explore and help shape the future digital music ecosystem. The first meet is this Wednesday and we are lucky enough to have Anthony from Hype Machine dropping in as our very first guest speaker while he is over in the UK.

More info: http://openmusicmedia.wordpress.com
RSVP: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/495490/

The idea for the group came at the beginning of the year after I began following some similar meetups from afar. It seemed like London was lacking something like this and after discussing the idea with Jonas we decided that we definitely had to do something. The response so far has been great so I think we made the right decision. It’s gonna be a great session and hopefully one of many to come.

I should also thank SF-based Open Media Web for a lot of the inspiration behind our similarly named OpenMusicMedia.

As I had a few hours to spare, before setting off for a nice long weekend down on the coast in St. Ives with friends, I decided to start a little blog maintenance. The first step was to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress which turned out to be a fairly painless process. Although if you notice anything not working then please let me know. The next steps will be to cleanup the right-hand sidebar and then maybe think about sprucing up the design a little bit. The final step will to be review what I want to achieve and deliver on the blog.

I’ve found that in the last month I’ve been using Twitter more and more to express my thoughts and share information and I have experimented with using TwitterTools to combine this blog and my Twitter stream. I think this still needs a little tweaking and during my holiday I’m hoping to re-evaluate how I will be using this.

In the meantime I have also setup the OpenMusicMedia Blog, which is a hosted Wordpress install. I’ll be posting a little more about OpenMusicMedia in the next week so keep your eyes peeled.