Dave Haynes

I love the idea of micro-publishing and lifestreaming in its many forms. I especially like the idea of objects that we interact with on a daily basis being able to passively make updates to our personal data streams. Some slighlty more out there examples include everything from a house that tweets its electricity consumption to the ultimate mum-geek must have, a pregnancy belt that tweets every time the baby kicks. We’re definitely going to see more and more of these types of applications and integrations being built as our everyday objects and hardware become connected to the interweb (and geo-aware).

Whilst it’s not exactly as crazy as the pregnancy belt, I was really interested to read last week that Richie Hawtin had developed a way to automatically tweet directly from the DJ booth. Here’s the lowdown via Beatportal:

Pioneering techno DJ Richie Hawtin has announced the development of a new Twitter application that enables him to broadcast his Traktor tracklists in real time over the network. The custom Twitter application was developed in-house by Richie Hawtin’s label Minus, and it works by uploading song metadata through Traktor Pro’s inbuilt broadcasting functionality. Track details are automatically posted to Richie Hawtin’s Twitter account every 30 seconds (you can already see Traktor tracklist updates on his Twitter), giving anyone access to the tracklist of his performance, and providing exposure to the artists and labels whose music is being played.

This is a really cool development, but as with a lot of data of this nature it gets a whole lot more interesting when it can be aggregated and context added. The individual tweets on Hawtin’s stream are actually quite dull just on their own. They really need to add a hashtag or two eg. #dj #minimal - then as more DJ’s started tweeting their sets somebody could build a third party site that pulled in all the data, created set lists from popular DJ’s and added other context such as listen/buy links. A site like that would be a gold mine for all the trainspotters and avid fans out there who like to be upfront and know what all they’re favourite DJ’s are playing. Let’s hope we could seeing something like this in the future.

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• Traktor to Twitter launched by Ritchie Hawtin. (wiretotheear.com)

A short while ago I blogged about my goal to raise more money for good causes in a year than I earn. I’m not sure if I’ll achieve this New Years Resolution but I’m certainly going to try and enjoy myself whilst trying. And I can now unveil the first project - Twestival.fm. We’re aiming to raise $20,000 in just two weeks by asking artists and labels to donate tracks. These tracks will then be made available on the main website and anyone streaming or downloading any music will be asked to leave a ‘tip’ in a Radiohead ‘pay what you want’ style.

It’s a great little project that combines two of the things I love… Twitter + digital music. It also  utilises SoundCloud (disclaimer - I work for SoundCloud) and the excellent new payment platform Tipjoy. It’s actually been quite simple to put together. I ended up putting the site together myself using a simple Wordpress template and teaching myself a little CSS so that I could lay it out how we needed. And then it was just a case of putting all the different pieces together using a little know-how and a lot of copy and paste. There’s still a lot of features that we’d like to implement and some of the processes are a little too manual and time-consuming but overall it’s worked out okay (so far!).

So what’s the history…? It was whilst working on another forthcoming project that @Stef (creator of the fabulous Odadeo and Isowish sites amongst others) gave me the idea to contact the people at Twestival to see if they needed some help co-ordinating a digital music project to run alongside the Twestivals taking place in 170+ cities across the world on February 12th.  The super hard-working @Amanda kindly and quickly put me in touch with an enthusiastic @Renate. Renate runs Madhouse Collective and is leading the charge on the music and entertainment front for Twestival so we soon hatched a plan over some introductions and dim sum in Soho (she paid, so I owe her lunch!).

Given the big time constraints and sudden busy-ness of many of the developers we intended to reach out to we’ve had to keep the project as simple as possible but it’s amazing how much you can achieve with the free tools available on the web in 2009. A site such as Twestival.fm which allows users to upload audio, make 100+ tracks available for streaming and download as well as taking micro-payments and cross-posting personalised messages to another website (ie. Twitter) would have either been impossible or very expensive to build just 2-3 years ago. It has cost no money to build and without any professional technical expertise. Our only costs so far have been the domain name registration, the SoundCloud Pro account (which was kindly donated anyhow) and the dim sum!

So what can you do to help?:

1) if you’re an artist/label then please go to http://twestival.fm and upload a track that you’d like to donate right now.
2) if you’re not an artist/label then please tell any that you know (and if you’re reading this blog then I’m sure there’s a high chance that you do know at least one).
3) if you Twitter please ask people to follow @twestivalfm

4) if you’re a company that might like to partner with or sponsor twestival.fm then please get in touch
5) go to the site sometime between 5th and 19th February and donate at least $5 to the cause!

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• Twestival - the big twitter meetup (doncrowley.blogspot.com)
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• Resolutions (bytesizemusic.net)
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Remember domain name parking? - when someone registers a useful domain, sits on it but frustratingly isn’t even using it.  Or when someone registers a domain that they think someone else will find useful in the hope of selling it to the highest bidder or making money from affiliate links. It’s annoying, but it’s become quite a norm, making it almost impossible to register a domain name using normal english dictionary words.  Domain names are valuable. One of the first things I did in my recent week of paternity leave was to register my son’s domain name. He’ll thank me for it one day!

Now there is a new phenomenon, Twitter Parking. I need a Twitter account for a few charity projects that I’m involved with this year. I resolved to lookup the names and register them as soon as possible and finally got around to it this morning. I wasn’t surprised however to find that all of them were taken… parked! Most had no activity updates at all and none were in regular use. The example below was even totally upfront about holding their username.

And unlike domains you don’t even need to get the credit card out to park your username.  All you need is the ability to setup a new email address for it. It looks like Twitter is more than aware of this of course and it looks like they have quite a progressive attitude towards the issue (although not without controversy). It is possible to claim inactive usernames as your own if the account has remained inactive for nine months and I’m sure we’ve seen some cases of celebs claiming fake accounts back as their own though I haven’t got any specific examples as I type this (please link up in the comments if you have).

So what are the lessons here? Twitter is crossing over to the mainstream. Your username is valuable. If you have a band, artist name, company, brand, meetup, idea, team, nickname… make sure you register the Twitter username. Before somebody else does!

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An essential part of any new music service should be the ability to share the music. Whether it’s collaborative playlists on Spotify, embedding a widget or just sharing a link it must be as easy and as simple as possible.

Recent tweaks to the SoundCloud ‘Share’ function include a newly improved (and viral) Facebook player and a super simple 3 click ‘Share on Myspace‘ which sure beats the hell out of having to copy and paste the HTML code.

One of my favourite features of online jukebox Songza is the “> Twitter this” button, something that SoundCloud was lacking.  But now that SoundCloud is open to the public I put this suggestion forward on a quick email to our dev team today. Exactly 1hr and 9mins after hitting send this appeared on the Share-box above each track on SoundCloud…

which resulted in this:

It’s just one perk of working with such a good team of people!! If that’s what can happen in just over an hour I can’t wait to see what SoundCloud will be like in 6 months.

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I still haven’t got round to thinking about a redesign for this blog but I have been making a few little tweaks here and there adding some fun new tools, plugins and widgets. Here is a quick run down of a few of them.

1) SoundCloud DropBox - a couple of posts ago I told you all about an excellent service called SoundCloud. Well I’ve finally got round to setting up my DropBox. You’ll see it at the bottom of the right hand column. If you want to send me any music, please use this. No more yousendit or random FTP drops pls.

2) Disqus - I don’t actually get that many comments here yet. I really should start publicising the site a bit more. But I’m still a sucker for a fantastic new plugin and Disqus is just that. Disqus adds a community dimension to the comments on this blog and hopefully makes it easier for you to post.

3) Zemanta - I’ve been using Zemanta on this site for a while now and I’m wondering how I ever lived without it. Zemanta is actually a Firefox plugin(!) that suggests contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using their own semantic analysis engine. It runs extremely smoothly, saves me time and really adds to each post.

4) Twitter Tools - this is a nice little plugin for Wordpress that posts to my Twitter stream everytime I make a post with the link and subject. It can also automatically create blog posts with a weekly or daily digest of my tweets. I turned this feature off however as it didn’t really suit my needs. I prefer just displaying my tweets as an RSS feed in the sidebar.

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.

I’d been thinking of getting back to my Twitter account properly for a few weeks now. I hadn’t used it since I registered a few months back (pre-blogging days) and hastily said ‘I don’t geddit!’. I think I understand it now and a few factors have pushed me over the edge. Props to Jonas from Last.fm for getting me there, I’m looking forward to following him out at SXSW.

I also took the time to install Twitter Tools for WordPress and I’m hoping this will work well. Twitter tools should automatically place a link on my Twitter stream as soon as I’ve published a new blog post. And likewise will dispay my Twitter stream on my blog (as well as posting a daily digest). Let’s see how it goes, if my Twitter activity is as dull as I can imagine it could be for the general public then I may well disable that side of Twitter Tools.