Grant Cerny

Lest anyone think Streampad was only available on Wordpress – NO! – Streampad has broken out like wildfire on Tumblr already.   And support for more blog platforms is coming!

A great example of Streampad + Tumblr magic:   http://www.fredwilson.fm

• Get your Tumblr Streampad on at http://www.streampad.com/

• Get your Wordpress Streampad on at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/streampad/

As visitors to my blog can see, I use Streampad to add tunes to my blog.

I’m proud to be THE FIRST to reblog the following from Dan Kantor at http://blog.dankantor.com/post/91673730/streampad-wordpress-plugin-now-available

“Streampad Wordpress plugin now available
We are proud to announce the general availability of our Streampad plugin for Wordpress! You can grab it here – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/streampad/

The plugin will search for all mp3 links in previous posts, as well as any new posts moving forward. You can also manually add mp3’s.

We’d love to hear feedback on this and how we could improve it.”

OK here’s an update.  Gregory Tomlinson, who did the Wordpress plugin development from Dan’s Streampad, asserts that he blogged it first when he checked in his code today.  Here he is on http://gregorytomlinson.com/encoded .

So I joked to a friend at work today that this past week’s work had gone too well.  It was charmed.  You can’t pull off this much stuff without more breakage than we had.  But we count our blessings.  Great long-term planning, great near-term planning, great orchestration of many teams, and great follow-through.

All that said, the joke still carried – what charm?     Owls.  Wizards.  Magic or something.  Whatever it was, I’ll take it!

Today we completed the migration of all of AOL / MediaGlow’s networked branded media destinations from an internal / legacy platform to the enterprise Brightcove solution (with of course some customizations). Many allnighters and countless concall minutes invested, brought to a very satisfactory head.

It was a mammoth undertaking that was primarily led by others too numerous to name – but to whom we owe extreme thanks, especially to some of the leadership which was changed inadvertently in midstream.

I have to say this is one of the most impressive executions I have seen in any company I have worked in, and – along and ranking with Live8 – tops during my nearing on 5 years at AOL.

… plenty of work to hit tomorrow of course! The backlog is strong

I’ve been through a bunch of video transitions since I started working in AOL Music & AOL Entertainment’s many different incarnations from 2004 to the present day.

We transcoded catalogs of video from NSV (Nullsoft Video) to Real (yuk!) and QuickTime (for Macs which at the time nobody had) to Windows Media Video (only slightly less yuk!) to WMV DRM’d video (yuk squared!) and finally to Flash Video (aaaaaah).

Now that we have a great video format and pretty hot quality, we are optimizing for cost in the CMS and player arena. As such, converting from internal solutions, to Brightcove’s enterprise solution. And tonight, we are starting the launch sequence for converting all of our asset management, ingestion, metadata handling, playback, and all associated dependent systems.

It’s a big and kinda scary transition, but we have had the right amount of preparation, and everyone is on point. Things will go wrong – I have no doubt. More to come.

Gregory Tomlinson sent me this Last.FM WP plugin he made yesterday.

“Btw, did I show you this
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lastfm-recent-tracks-widget/
I built a little widget / plugin – planning to use the same concept for AOL music charts”

Now… to try it out.