Rex Is Excited

Twones is a new online music service that automatically tracks every song a user plays while online—whether via iTunes, YouTube, last.fm or services—and then creates a single timeline of the music they’ve been listening to. Users can share their timelines and discover new music by exploring a friend’s musical history. The service, which launches in December, works via a small browser plug-in.

The innovative aspect? Twones is pushing its offer one step further by collaborating with Tony Player, a system that builds playlists from multiple Twones timelines. When Twones members arrive at a club that uses Tony Player, they register their presence via text message or their phone’s bluetooth connection. The tracks they’ve most recently listened to—as registered by Twones—are then imported to the DJ’s playlist. The DJ picks from those tracks and mixes them, building a set based entirely on the crowds’ recent musical preferences. To add extra recognition and excitement for people whose songs are played, their headshots and usernames are displayed on a giant screen. The event previewed at the Amsterdam Dance Event last week.

While nights that encourage party-goers to bring their own iPods have been around for a while, this our first exposure to DJs drawing directly from online playlists, and not requiring active crowd participation. Members make their presence known, and the system accesses and broadcasts elements of their online identity. Part of the OFF=ON trend, it’s an interesting example of extending online networks and online behaviour to the ‘real’ world. One to play with!

Website: www.tonyplayer.com — www.twones.com
Contact: lukas@tonyplayer.com

Spotted by: Jeroen Bouwman

Here’s a video I did awhile back, now in "HD" so you can actually see it, versus what Flickr did to my video the first time I uploaded it.

Twitter Reply Notifications (Screencast) from Rex Pechler on Vimeo.

I’m also testing here if a "private" video can still be embedded publicly (for a friend).

Ever since I installed MobileScrobbler on my iPhone, I’ve been using Last.fm a lot … like almost every day, and for hours at a time. Here’s my profile. Last.fm “scrobbles” (keeps track of what you listen to, and uploads that info) your music, and my iPhone automatically does this when I listen to anything in the iPod feature, and so does my Mac when I listen to anything in iTunes. Why do I want to do this? For posterity, as you might imagine, but Last.fm also provides music recommendations in the form of a personalized radio station. And the personalized radio station is what I really love. I mean, you press play, and you’ve got all sorts of new stuff to listen to, and the percentage of it that I like is much higher than listening to anything else. And it’s more interactive, because I can teach the system my preferences by pressing either the “Love” or “Ban” buttons.

Anyway, MobileScrobbler lets me read lyrics while I listen to songs… Which I LOVE doing. That Mac version however, does -not- do this. I was able however, to find a Greasemonkey script that adds lyrics to the song page on Last.fm, and therefore enables a workaround. (Greasemonkey is a FireFox plugin that I use daily… it let’s you add things to, and modify websites. People make scripts to make all sorts of websites do all sorts of cool things. Check out http://userscripts.org for examples).

My workaround is this: Listen in the Last.fm app. When I want to read lyrics for the current song, just click the link in the app to open up the song page at last.fm. The greasemonkey script shows the lyrics right there for me. Works.

Oh, and then I can also comment on the song right there too, another feature I’d like to see added to the Last.fm Mac client.

Ever playing music for other people from iTunes? And want to change the song without everyone noticing? Trying to do a manual fade is tough. This script lets you select the next song you want to play, and then fade the volume out and in to that track. Download: itunes-fade-to-selected-track.zip


property initialVolume : null
tell application "iTunes"
set speed to 5 -- lower means slower fade
if sound volume = 0 then -- if volume is all the way down, fade in
play
set initialVolume to 60
repeat until (sound volume) is greater than or equal to (initialVolume - speed)
set sound volume to (sound volume + speed)
end repeat
set sound volume to initialVolume
else -- fade out, skip to selected track, fade in
set initialVolume to (get sound volume)
repeat until (sound volume - speed) is less than or equal to 0
set sound volume to (sound volume - speed)
end repeat
set sound volume to 0
play selection
repeat until (sound volume + speed) is greater than or equal to initialVolume
set sound volume to (sound volume + speed)
end repeat
end if
end tell


Daft Punk is promoting their upcoming album, Alive, with this embeddable widget. I like Daft Punk, and embrace their use of of the web… here’s their widget:

Montreal-based Brandfame has launched itself as a product placement agency for YouTube and other online video sharing platforms, connecting makers of online videos with brands that want to be integrated into the next viral video blockbuster.

Advertisers can list products they'd like to have featured in videos, and search for upcoming videos by producers to find a match for their brand. Producers indicate which productions they're willing to integrate products into, and can search for brands or products they'd like to work with. Once a deal has been made, the advertiser pays the producer, and Brandfame takes a cut. The startup is also working on an auction system for advertisers to bid on product placement in new videos by hot producers.

Brandfame is just getting started, and has only signed up a handful of producers and advertisers. But its aim is to become a premier marketplace for product placement in video-sharing websites. As online video's share of the entertainment market expands, opportunities for advertisers, producers and facilitators like Brandfame are taking off. Watch this space! (Related: Agency for customer-made ads.)

Website: www.brandfame.com
Contact: help@brandfame.com

Spotted by: Susanna Haynie

My favorite podcast
… is Hype Machine: Popular Tracks. (RSS)

It’s like a firehose of music!

It’s essentially an aggregator for mp3 blogs, and the ‘Popular’ part of the site lists the most commonly posted mp3 files.

To listen quickly, just go to hypem.com/popular in your browser, and click on the “Pop-up Flash Player”. I do that sometimes when I’m on another computer.

Whoa! they have an internet radio station too? Interesting… maybe I’ll start listening to internet radio on my Treo again… only problem is that I don’t like everything that’s ‘popular’ in mp3 blogs (and I don’t like what’s playing right now)… so maybe I’ll stick to the podcast, and that way I can pick what songs to listen to (and I can do that from the iPod, not just iTunes).

Back to the podcast…
there’s all kinds of music, mainly Indie Rock/Folk, some Electronic, some Hip-Hop/Rap… and the mp3s are both single songs, and sometimes longer mixes. But caution: this music isn’t filtered for kids (sometimes explicit lyrics).

To get started, subscribe to this feed (Just drag that link into iTunes!). But there’s one more step:

Create a ‘Smart Playlist’ (cmd+opt+n) for [Album] [is] [Popular Blog Tracks - The Hype Machine].

This way, iTunes will play right through them… not stopping at the end of each song, like it does when you’re in the ‘Podcasts’ view.

I propose a new term, ‘hype-pop’…

Enjoy!

There’s smoke above that crowd..
Originally uploaded by rpechler.

I took this photo my Freshman year at UC Santa Cruz. Best viewed large.

Here’s a map of the location http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&z=16&t=k&om=1&msid=100166750407101759559.000001120cc81d19bcf0f&msa=0 (best viewed in Satellite mode)

I’m really happy to be video blogging. Excited about it to the point of shaking. I’ve explored campus in new ways today, and I really like how it’s affected my sociability. I mean, I ended up interviewing someone I’ve met in class before, but now we’re going to be working on a project together in a class this quarter… Neat stuff.

I posted today to Twitter that I’m having trouble deciding where to draw the line on what to post to Twitter, and what to keep to myself. Now I’m realizing the problem is bigger than Twitter, it’s deciding where to post what. I sometimes feel like a fountain of content now, especially with Twitter, where “Waking up” is postable material.

This week is my first dabble into videoblogging, and for the past couple days I’ve neglected writing anything at RexIsExcited. I’ve been busy recording and editing video. So, the new problem is, what do I write, and what do I (video) record?

One solution would be to try to write out all my ideas, and then switch to video only if I’m having trouble conveying my excitement (!) with just words. Of course, interviews and such would warrant video posts as well. And I guess all this depends on reader/viewer feedback, which hasn’t really happened yet (you can email me!).

Anyway, I’m really happy to be participating in videobloggingweek2007, and would encourage you to do the same, even if you haven’t started yet (nobody’s gonna mind). I’m curious what you think about my predicament, and about how you’re drawing the lines.

I’ve thought about video-blogging for a long time. I read something Robert Scoble shared in Google Reader, about http://videobloggingweek.pbwiki.com/. Anyway, I’ve decided to participate, and my terrible first video is (or at least should be) embedded below.