Can Tumblr Be My New Blip.fm?

Assuming the ominous signs are correct, and Blip.fm is about to go from cool music sharing and discovery service to an RIAA-ravaged skeleton of its former self, I need a new music site to take its place. There aren’t any obvious candidates, so I have been looking far afield in search of a new music hangout. While I post regular music-related content here at Newsome.Org, it’s not the best place for frequent video posts and short links to good public MP3s.

While it’s not perfect, I think I may have found my new thing. Tumblr. Sure, I’ve known about Tumblr for a while, but until this past weekend I hadn’t used it. I signed up on Saturday and spent a little time creating my Tumblr page.

Let’s take a closer look.

Registration is easy. Afterwards, you can choose from a ready-made Theme or write (or hack) your own, via a small but functional custom HTML box.

It’s a pretty simple exercise to customize your Tumblr page, and add whatever links and other information you want to display. After you get your layout the way you want it, it’s time to add some content. This is where Tumblr really shines.

Via the Tumblr Dashboard, from which you manage your Tumblr page layout and content, there are forms to upload or embed text, photos, quotes, links, chat transcripts, audio and video. The cornucopia of sharing options reminds me of all the reasons Pownce was a vastly superior content sharing platform compared to the more popular and celebrity-infested, but feature-challenged, Twitter.

The audio and video forms allow you to either upload an audio or video file or to embed a file hosted elsewhere. Particularly helpful is the ability to embed a YouTube video merely by pasting the URL into the form. The process is as simple as it could be.

An even better way to add YouTube videos to your Tumblr page is via the Tumblr bookmarklet. When you share content with the bookmarklet from a YouTube page, the video is automatically embedded in your Tumblr page, along with a descriptive caption. This is a really cool feature. If Tumblr could add the ability to do the same thing with audio links, perhaps via a right click, Tumblr could take media sharing to a whole new level.

There’s a very neat iPhone app, a Mac Dashboard Widget (which I haven’t tried) and the ability to add audio posts via your phone, which might be cool to do from a live performance. You can also add posts via email, or IM. And there are a ton of third party apps to explore and experiment with.

One of those third party apps adds one very important feature– the ability to play all of your audio posts in a playlist equivalent.

Once you add some content, you can also edit or delete posts via the Dashboard.

At the end of the process, you get a really cool page with mixed media in one handy place. There is an optional Twitter integration, that will post links to your posts to your Twitter account, and there is the ability to add up to five RSS feeds to your Tumblr page. One thing I do not like, is the layout of the archive page. It’s ugly and, well just ugly. And I don’t see any way to customize it.

Tumblr also lacks to built-in audience and sharing features (props, listeners, re-blips, responses, etc.) of Blip.fm. This is a big drawback, but if the empty bag holding RIAA is determined to kill the cool services like Blip.fm and all the music sales they promote, it may be that non-centralized locations may be the only way to go if you want to remain relatively unshackled.

While Tumblr has more than enough features to serve as the sharing equivalent of Blip.fm, it does not yet provide the same discovery function. I’m not sure how to address that problem. One idea would be to collaborate on and post a shared Tumblr blog roll of similar music pages (the Tumblr directory doesn’t seem to serve a close enough function). A better idea might be to share a Tumblr page with a group of like-minded music fans. That’s something I will probably explore if I can find some other folks who like a good mix of alt. country, country rock, classic rock and blues.

In the meantime, check out my Tumblr page for some good music. And if you’re an artist doing that sort of music, send me an MP3 file or link and I’ll see about adding it to the playlist.

Evening Reading: 5/17/09

How Not to Catch Tigers: You need to see this video of a tiger turning the tables on some park rangers who (a) captured her cubs and then (b) decided to ride around on elephants nearby. Maybe I’m a sissy, but if I’m out trying to catch a tiger, I want to be on something a little faster than an elephant. Like, say, a Land Rover. Or a helicopter.

This is as Messed Up as Messed Up Can Be: So this lady’s diabetic daughter can’t see a doctor, but she gets the vapors at her resulting trial and they call 911? I would have suggested she say a prayer or something. I’m a pretty religious guy, and this sort of nonsense really chaps my ass.

Technowhat: Steven Hodson on Technorati’s efforts to stay relevant, or at least alive. Technorati had a chance back in the Dave Sifry era, but the train left the station while Technorati was looking for a ticket.

Tis But a Decade: Lost in LaMancha is a very interesting documentary about Terry Gilliam’s previously unsuccessful effort to reinvent the Don Quixote story, originally to star Johnny Depp. Now, probably thanks in part to the legitimization of time travel via Lost, it looks like he may one day succeed.

Comcast Complaint Department: For the past week or so, my Comcast broadband connection has become spotty, fading out regularly for short periods. Anyone else having a similar problem?

Science Fiction (Ooh Ooh Ooh) Double Feature Department: Here’s Someone’s List of the 50 Essential Sci-Fi Films.

King Kahn Department: Any time the king has a new song, you can count on hearing it here: 69 Faces of Love. Yeah, that’s pretty tame for the king. If you want less normal king, try Land of the Freak. Buy King Kahn and The Shrines records at Amazon. (via Hear Ya)

At the Edge of the Tech Universe: If just converting LPs to MP3s is not fringe enough for you, here’s how to rip a 78 RPM record to a Mac. Unfortunately, the only guy who’d ever want to do that is the dude who wrote that article.

Whose Line Was that Anyway: 100 of the best movie lines in 200 seconds.

Star Trek Department: Popular Science asks if Warp Speed is possible. If not, there’s always Ludicrous Speed.

Speaking of Ludicrous: Here’s some more ludicrous jargon, courtesy of ReadWriteWeb and its beloved semantic web. I just don’t understand how smart people can react so reverently when they see something like this:

If that was coming out of a horn, it would be perfect for a Monty Python movie. Honestly, I think if someone expressed this lint in a complex mathematical equation, some of these folks would literally faint from excitement. Forget all that nerdery, if they want to be all academic and whatnot, RWW should focus only on answering this question. Maybe it will help that the word Harvard appears in the first line.

Let’s Kill the Monster Before it Takes Over the World: As much as I fervently wish the Semantic Web concept would disappear off the face of the earth, like most of the other Web 2.whatever concepts, I would be even happier if retweeting was banned by Twitter. Or Congress. Or God. Retweeting is the bastard offspring of three horrible things: laziness, spam and cronyism.

Meanwhile, Back on this Earth: ReadWriteWeb also takes a look at the Feedburner problem. Google is gambling with a lot of goodwill, with the way it continues to ignore the epic problems with Feedburner. Yes, I know there are alternatives, but I also know that a lot of people have built their subscriber numbers using (and in spite of) Feedburner. Google should spend some of the fortune it made on the back of the publishers who rely on Feedburner and fix it. Just fracking fix it.

Department of Photographs: Today’s installment in my quest to become an average photographer includes 14 Great Photography Tips and a primer on shooting portraits on a budget.

Snowmen in the Sun: the End of Blip.fm?

blipfm I have written favorably about Blip.fm, the web site and application that lets you share music with others in a Twitter-like fashion. I’ve been a regular user for several months, and until now have been putting together an awesome A-Z new wave playlist. As with any fun online music service, however, there’s always been a concern in the back of my mind that, like Frosty the Snowman, Blip.fm was too good to last. And it looks like the melting has begun.

Jeff Yasuda, the head of the Blip.fm development team, has announced that some changes are coming. And none of them are good.

First of all, the music available at Blip.fm will soon be coming almost exclusively from Imeem, another music discovery service. I’ve never used Imeem, but a quick look tells me we are talking about a severely reduced universe of songs. A search at Imeem returned exactly one Star Room Boys song, compared to the twenty or so you used to find at Blip.fm. And not a single Steve Pride song. How can you consider yourself a music service and not have a single copy of, say, Welcome to the Big Time? If you want to hear the best alternative country record ever made or ever to be made, go buy Pride on Pride.

While you may not have to visit Imeem to stream the songs via Blip.fm, the interface at Imeem is about as fun as a root canal. Compared to the simple elegance of the Blip.fm site, it is a chaotic mashup of train wrecks. In sum, I have zero interest in Imeem as a service, and the resulting reduction in available songs will materially diminish the fun factor at Blip.fm, especially for users like me who look for old or obscure music.

Adding to the pain is a new limitation on adding songs from public locations. Currently, if you know the URL for an mp3, you can easily add that song to your Blip.fm playlist. Under the new plan, public mp3s will be limited to “legitimate bands and labels approved in our systems.” There’s a sign-up form at Blip.fm where I suppose labels and perhaps independent artists can sign up to get their music included in the new database.

There are other changes. The Blip.fm widget, which was crappy already, will only list the song but will not generally play it.

And, as the biggest bummer of all, current songs on your playlist will be replaced, where possible, by content from the Imeem catalog, and any song not in that catalog will “temporarily” cease to play. I don’t know what that means for songs that aren’t and won’t be in the Imeem catalog, but it doesn’t sound good for my new wave playlist.

There are promises about forthcoming new partnerships that may allow additional content, and I hope that happens.

But until the music industry as we have known it dies and is reborn as a direct artist to consumer market, the Blip.fm’s of the world are like snowmen in the sun. You better enjoy them while you can, because it’s only a matter of time before they melt.

The Jim Jones Revue, Rocked, Rolled and Reviewed

One of life’s great pleasures is discovering a new band that really blows you away. I had one of those moments today when, thanks to 30 Days Out, I discovered The Jim Jones Revue.

Start with the true father of rock and roll, Little Richard. Add big helping of vintage punk rock attitude, and a hard charging, rip-roaring, garage band-style blues vibe. Then crank up the volume, toss your head around wildly and start digging The Jim Jones Revue’s self-titled record. Released last year, this record completely and relentlessly rocks. From the first second of the first song, Princess & the Frog to the last second of the last song, Cement Mixer, this record simply doesn’t let up. Unadulterated rock and roll. It sounds like The Black Keys on some Carlos Castaneda-inspired mushroom trip. And I mean that in a good way.

Need to hear it for yourself? Take a listen to Hey Hey Hey Hey. If that doesn’t rock your socks off, you must be barefooted and deaf.

If you like rock and roll, go buy this record right now. And turn it up.

While you’re at it, imagine for a moment that you’re back in the golden era of music videos, watching 120 Minutes, and this comes pouring out of your TV.

Not too shabby, huh?

Evening Reading: 5/12/09

Mashup Department: Kill fire ants by turning them into a horror movie. I wonder if Lou Diamond Phillips is in it?

Literary Acumen: Impress your friends by interpreting nursery rhymes for them.

What’s a Blog, Again: Prob Logger (I know, but that’s a cooler name) has 10 ways not to promote your blog.

This Reminds Me of Something: Task.fm looks like a neat little Twitter inspired idea that takes more time than, say, adding the event to your calendar. But these days, it’s all about the 140.

Fancy Jargon Department: I’m over Wolfram|Alpha before I even see it, simply because it calls itself a “computational knowledge engine.” One thing I’ve learned in my 15 years or so online is that really cool stuff doesn’t need fancy jargon. There is generally an inverse relationship between fancy jargon and usefulness. The (ugh) “semantic web” is the best example of this. If you want to feel semantically smart, here’s more on the so called Google killer.

Nerdywood Squares: Google took a quick break from being killed by Wolfram to work on Google Squared, which extracts data from web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. Here’s a news flash- for 99% of the population, Google search works just fine. There are far too many people trying to fix what ain’t broken. Here’s a screen shot, which doesn’t really get me all that excited.

See Google Blogoscoped for more

It Just Does Department: Popular Science looks scientifically at just exactly why shit happens.

Keep Photography Beautiful: Tintii looks like a cool application for photo manipulation.

Department of Musicology: The “B” Side did a cool thing for Lattimore Brown. You need to read that story, and watch the EconoLodge & Holiday Inn rehearsal videos. And especially the video of his appearance at the Ponderosa Stomp Music Conference.

That Micro-financing Sound: Linda Thompson is using micro-financing to raise money for her next record. You can get a free MP3 if you’re willing to give out your email address. I donated a little bit. For $5000, she’ll actually record one of your songs. I wish I could afford that. I’d ask her to record When You’re Sitting at the Bar (which she could clobber).

Evening Reading: 5/10/09

Department of Holidays: Happy Mother’s Day to Raina and all the other moms out there. Here’s my post from two years ago about my mom.

Dollhouse Department: I was pretty underwhelmed by the first few episodes, but the show really grew on me. I thought the season (and likely series) finale was excellent. io9 has a good recap, an argument that Dollhouse is Joss Whedon’s greatest work, a theory on why everyone in the Dollhouse may be a doll, and a faint hope for a spin-off. I still prefer Firefly, another great show canned too early by Fox, but I hope we see more Dollhouse.

Drag and Drop Encoding to Go: EncodeHD promises a simple drag and drop application to encode your video for playback on your device of choice. iPhones are supported, of course.

MediaSmart Server Department: Thankfully, HP has decided to do the right thing and push the new software to the first generation servers, like mine. No space shuttle required.

Blip.fm Department: Thanks to @accepta for being the first (to my knowledge) to blip of one of my songs. Lots of my songs are available via the Blip.fm search box, so please blip away!

Department of Stupidity: I have and will continue to raise a vigorous defense against those who continually criticize everything Christian, but crap like this does not help my cause. It’s important to remember that there are extreme views in every organization and in every faith and those at the edges do not represent the generally quieter and more rational majority.

Speaking of Church: The United Methodist Church has smartly adopted a social media approach to its web site.

Cool Video Department: Here’s a neat time lapse of a ship moving through Houston at night (via A Welsh View).

Photography Workflow: Thomas Hawk describes how he manages his massive photography jones.

More Awesome Photography: I can’t describe how much I dig Joshua Hoffine’s horror photography. You have to check this out.

Publish or Perish Department: Here’s a list of 20 top print on demand services. And here are 6 ways to publish your book.

Hunting for Real Men: I have no respect (to put it mildly) for those dudes who go to Africa and shoot lions and elephants and whatnot. They should stone up and do it this way.

New Podcast: EELS #63

Dave and I got together for The Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show #63 this week. Mike was off doing some sort of real work, so we just talked about him instead of to him. Among the many other topics we covered are Roy Blumenthal‘s excellent art, Wikipedia, Twitter, my excellent experience with Microsoft’s Live Writer developer support, the very useful Topify and Pogoplug (my review here).

As always, we had lots of good discussion, debate and laughs. Read more details here, or give us a listen by clicking here. I’m the one with the funny accent.

If you’re into tech, and particularly if you are a developer of a cool app that needs a little exposure, drop me a line (see the link in the left hand column) and we’ll see about having you on a future show. Trust me, it’s a good time.

Is It Time to Put Sirius XM on Deathwatch?

One of my primary online pastimes is watching technology I like go through agonizing death spirals. TIVO is still twitching a little, and I had hope that the not-so-forthcoming new DirecTV box was going to spur a comeback of Billsian, if not Biblical, proportions. I’m in a wait and see mode, but not as hopeful as I’d like to be.

Another technology I have enjoyed is satellite radio. I’ve been an XM subscriber for years, and the merger with Sirius gave me the improved Classic Vinyl station, and the far too Americana (I greatly prefer alt. country) Outlaw Country. And I lost track of Bill Anderson‘s excellent talk show (which should be released on a CD boxed set). But overall, I thought the merger was necessary and, at worst, a wash for listeners.

Yet the combined Sirius XM continues to lose subscribers. My personal view is that they way overpaid for the Oprahs and Howards, which I have no interest in, and sports, which I have interest in, but not via radio. As a result, they have to charge me more to subsidize those who care about that stuff. But that may not be what’s really hurting Sirius/XM.

I think it might be iPhones and other almost as smart phones. Here’s my theory.

First, I am convinced that the lion’s share of satellite radio listening is done in the car, a theory which has some support in the details regarding the subscriber loss. I have logged maybe two hours of in the house satellite radio listening over the years. Previously, the amount of daily time I spend in my car combined with my well documented aversion to ads made satellite radio worth the money, in both hardware and monthly costs.

But lately I find that I am getting the large majority of my music from Pandora and Slacker Radio. The depth of programming options are simply greater there. I have a deeply targeted alt. country station on each, as well as a blues mix that plays the sort of blues I like, without most of the stuff I don’t. I like early ska and reggae- I have a station for that. I like zydeco- yep, I have a station for that. In sum, I can fine tune my preferences much, much better with Pandora and Slacker Radio than I can with Sirius XM. In fact, I’m finding myself listening to my online options even more than I listen to songs on my music server at home- and I have a ton of music on there.

Plus, online stations allow me to access my music more easily and from more places. When I’m at a computer, it’s easy to tune into one of my Pandora or Slacker Radio stations. No additional hardware needed. Both services have excellent iPhone apps (Sirius XM doesn’t have one). Lately, when I’m in my car, I have found myself plugging my iPhone into the auxiliary input on my audio system and listening to Pandora or Slacker Radio while I’m driving. Better mix, no ads.

On top of all that, it’s cheaper. Why buy special hardware and pay through the nose for a satellite radio subscription – for each device, no less – when you could pay much less for a premium online radio subscription that you can take with you anywhere? It sounds like a no-brainer, because I think it probably is.

For the moment, I have both. But if I had to choose one or the other, I would quickly choose Pandora/Slacker Radio over Sirius XM.

And I suspect that trend will continue to work against satellite radio.

From the Jukebox: John the Wolf King of LA

John the Wolf King of LA (1970) is the first solo record by John Phillips, one of the leaders of and primary songwriters for the Mamas and the Papas. It’s a mildly countrified record (largely thanks to Buddy Emmons’ excellent pedal steel work), with several excellent songs, including my favorite, “Topanga Canyon.” Most of the songs dealt with recent events in Phillips’ life, including references to his new girlfriend Genevieve Waite (the sort of freaky “Let it Bleed, Genevieve”) and longtime friend Ann Marshall (the Emmons’ featuring “April Anne”).

Phillips was the primary songwriter and musical arranger of the Mamas and the Papas, and had a major hand in the band’s string of hits. He also wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, the 1967 Scott McKenzie hit, and the oft-covered “Me and My Uncle,” which was popularized (at least to me) by the Grateful Dead. He co-wrote the Beach Boys‘ hit “Kokomo.”

The performances on this record are spectacular. Phillips was backed by an all-star group of musicians, including members of Elvis Presley’s band, including James Burton, among others. Other members of the Mamas and the Papas said that if the band had recorded the material from John the Wolf King of LA, it might have been their best album.

The very cool album cover was the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s wardrobe and pose on Dylan’s excellent 1976 album Desire.

This was one of my turntable mainstays back in the 70’s, and I rediscovered it when it was rereleased a few years ago, with several bonus tracks. It’s not quite country enough to fit squarely in my early country rock sweet spot (in some alternate universe somewhere Clarence White brought his B-Bender magic to this record), but it’s plenty good and, unlike a lot of music of the era, has aged well. It sounds as good today as it did the first time I heard it.

Steve Gillmor & RSS: Out of Chaos and into Absurdity

I remember the beginning of Out of Chaos, a book I read over 30 years ago. There was a passage about the worldview of a tiny insect on a leaf, and how to that insect the leaf, and at most the tree, was his universe. I can’t remember much else from that book, but I remember that part.

Because I keep seeing the same thing happen over and over on the internet. Take some new online application, toss in a celebrity or two, get some venture capitalists to bait their greater fool hooks with some fuzzy math and, presto, the world is suddenly turned on its side.

Except it isn’t. At least not for anyone who doesn’t live on that same leaf, in that same tree.

Even online applications and protocols that have been around a long time and could make life easier are often ignored by the general public. Take RSS, for example. I can count on two hands the number of people, of any age, I know in the real world who use RSS. Heck, most of the people I know don’t even use the internet all that much for news. Sure, they check their newspaper’s web site and maybe CNN for breaking news and they may check their stock quotes on Yahoo or Google, but they still get the lion’s share of their news from the paper. You know- that wad of dead trees that some dude tosses at your porch every morning.

And now comes Steve Gillmor trying to argue, presumably with a straight face, that RSS is dead and everyone should get all of their news from Twitter. From freaking Twitter, for crying out loud. Why not from a Ouija Board? Or a mood ring? Even though I can’t get him to converse with me on said Twitter, I have met Steve and he’s a smart guy. So maybe his article is satire and I’m not getting it. But I don’t think so.

While RSS may very well be dead to most of the real world, to suggest that people are going to go from a technology they barely, if at all, grasp (RSS) to one they know absolutely nothing about (Twitter) is perhaps the most optimistic bit of navel gazing in the history of the typed word. People might go look at Twitter because Oprah talks about it, but that’s a far cry from relying on it as a primary source of information. Shoot, I go to the circus every year or two, but I don’t live there.

Not only is no one who matters going to treat Twitter as the new CNN, anyone who wants anything resembling reliable information in anything resembling an organized fashion is not going to rely on Twitter. For one thing, no one- and I mean no one- is going to read, much less rely on, the Twitter public stream or topical word searches that capture ten spam posts for every legitimate one. The signal to spam to noise quotient on Twitter is simply off the scale. Just to make Twitter enjoyable, you have to manage your follows zealously. And of course there are no archival features on Twitter. You can only see what’s been posted recently.

It’s going backwards. Like watching the news at 10:00 on live TV.

Let me say it again, Google News has folders, archival features, add-ons to improve those archival features, etc., etc. Twitter has none. This, in and of itself, is one of the fatal flaws in Steve’s illogic.

I agree- and have said so over and over here- that RSS is not perfect. Google has tried to single-handedly kill RSS by acquiring and then completely ignoring Feedburner. And I have said many times, that RSS needs to get a lot closer to real time. But real time, filtered poorly can be very noisy. If I see yet another stale post about some beat to death topic in my RSS feeds, I’ll see it five or ten or twenty-five times on Twitter. The echo chamber in Twitter is deeper and more resonant than in Google Reader, or even the blogosphere as a whole. Steve may not know that, because I really don’t think he uses Twitter for broad interaction. I think he uses it as a platform for a written version of his podcast, where others get to observe him talking to a few selected people.

But he’s far from alone. I think Steve and many others have fooled themselves into thinking that their leaf on the big old celebrity infested Twitter tree is representative of the larger world. But it’s not.

Thankfully.