Extension.FM is a Google Chrome extension (yes this means you have to install Google Chrome, but you will be glad you did, I think). It keeps track of all of the online music you encounter as you surf across various music blogs like Spinner, Pitchfork, Tuneage, and Fluxblog.  Like an elephant, but much faster than an elephant, Extension.fm remembers every single web reference, all the song metadata, including album art etcetera that you find as you surf.  In fact as of today, it also can import the top 50 songs from your Tumblr dashboard. The result? A web-based personalized music discovery experience that aggregates your favorite sources and helps you simplify your web-based listening into one place.   It also scrobbles to Last.fm (sweet!).

What’s next?  I dunno – probably whatever is coolest that the best users of Extension.fm (like me) ask for most.   I think it’s local playlisting support.  But I could be wrong.  It could be a social filter, or two.  Hell, it’s great already, so everything else will be gravy!

Here’s a 30-second video slideshow I made with Animoto.

Apparently there is more snow coming tonight!



Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

I caught up on everything that’s going on with Playdar, the open music-resolver technology started by Richard Jones, founder/former CTO of Last.fm, and pretty widely embraced by the whole music hacking / music product innovation community, whereby running a lightweight server on a local host can take any given bunch of requested music tracks, and find local or networked matching media files, to “resolve” or find sources for, the music in question. Given that we were all on the same local net and running the playdar localhosts, it was fascinating to see how hacking devs (and me, a has-been dev, now product evangelist) created new ways to express music discovery within and amongst our local media collective, as well as the many extensions offered by the EchoNest APIs, and other sources. I am loathe to have to head home in the morning, since the demos of everyone’s hacks are being reviewed Sunday. But Dan will catch me up on his hack and all the rest.

The very long day resulted in a great deal of critical thought and creative energy for me. I came up with a number of ideas regarding Music Influencer extensions, which I think can result in an ecosystem of incentive for platform providers (such as EchoNest), integrating developers, catalog-holding providers (such as Last.fm), music publishers, labels and artists themselves. The thrashing of the music industry will be solved, one way or the other, in the upcoming few years, as labels and artists regain equlibrium in the new value chain, and it’s likely that the resolvers like Playdar and the platforms like EchoNest are positioned to offer the mediating layer which properties on all levels of the chain can utilize to restore playfulness, fun, extensible openness and scale to Music in the new, networked, real-time web world.

We ended up at Jimmy D’s in Davis Square, at the “EchoNestival”, a party thrown by the EchoNest sponsors, where we three acts played, and got progressively more intense and awesome – Faces on Film, The Bodega Girls, and EL – P. I have at least three new albums to buy after tonight’s lineup, that’s for certain.

Many thanks to Microsoft, the EchoNest and other givers in making today’s hackday (and tomorrow’s which I will miss) a great success.

It was also great to meet Paul Lamere, Tristan Harris and Brian Whitman from the EchoNest, as well as to catch up with Jason Herskowitz, and to meet Lucas Gonze and get philosophical about how real-time, space-erased data availability can modify and multiply the progress of cultural and psychological evolution.

I look forward to reviewing the results of Sunday’s hack presentation demos.

While we all look forward to what Facebook will be doing with Spotify as Spotify works on its US domestic licensing (which prevents the US public at large from accessing the increasingly-coveted product, as the EU-based public has for some time enjoyed,  ad-supported or premium ad-free), the music internets went into high BPMs after Mark issued his vote of approval.

So there is a madding crowd for Spotify suddenness, and US access is in high demand.   Luckily, I have had Spotify beta for several months now, and liked it a lot when I first tried it, but later got distracted and went back to my mainstreams:  iTunes, iPod, SHOUTcast, and Streampad music blog discovery mostly on Tumbleblogs.   But Spotify is indeed good… first of all, it’s good software.  The UX is very fine.  The graphic design is like a strong, heavy, and ultimately winning weapon.   Most importantly everything links and is draggable.

What’s missing?  I guess I am not quite satisfied with the Now Playing experience during discovery, and the fact that Radio basically means “lean back listening” these days not “Radio”, but I will always find something missing in anything, while still being positively impressed.

The largest “miss” which is probably next on their product backlog is social services.  Beyond Last.FM scrobbling, there is no social integration.  For example right now I am listening to David Guetta, album One Love, track David Guetta – On The Dancefloor (Featuring Will I Am & Apl De Ap) .  I want to be dancing in a club, not in my kitchen geeking out with headphones while my family enters dreamland.  I’m in a zone.  I want to share with my peeps and maybe find out who else is in the zone, with Guetta or maybe the same genre or maybe even on the same downbeat in the same BPM.  Why not?  Why couldn’t I find friends who are on the same beat?  There is no reason why not with the technology we have.  Once that’s done we could mash up the tunes against the synchronized beats.  But… I digress.

Spotify currently has no social integration.  I’m not talking its own SocialNet like Last.FM approaches, but just the social services such as FriendFeed or Ping.fm or other innumerable offerings out there.  I’m sure that’s coming soon… unless a Facebook deal shutters out the openness.  I hope that won’t happen.

I hope that Spotify will emerge as a surviving player amongst the corpse-ridden battlegrounds of digital music knights:   Napster (not dead, just different) Total Music (dead), Rhapsody (not at all dead, just bleeding), and all the playlisters including Muxtape (dead), Seeqpod (pretty darn dead!), and about six others I could remember if I rifled around in my email.  I guess 8Tracks is still gaining momentum and that’s great – good for David Porter and his crew, making me think the only playlisting model that’s sustainable is for the brand to pay royalties at lowest rate possible and make the play-time such a great experience that it can be adjacently monetized, probably by the context adjacency of other user value.

This post started off as a tweet.  I guess I had way more than 140 characters in me.  Thankfully I do have a blog for these rare occasions.  Now heading back to ‘da club!

“Beginning at 12 PM ET and lasting until midnight, tweet your song request on Twitter as follows:

Artist Name, Song Title #aolradiorequest (example: Madonna, Like a Prayer #aolradiorequest)

If we have it, we’ll play it the next day at aolradio.com.

Full details are at: http://www.aolradioblog.com/2009/06/09/aol-radio-all-tweet-song-request-radio-station/ “

Semantic

The search engines, and predominantly Google, “organized the world’s information” through smart robots that find and sort and rank content continuously and tirelessly, according to smart and ever-smarter algorithms. The world reorganized itself around search engines as the fastest and easiest method for finding relevant content.

Social

The searchers soon found that a supplemental index of relevance, the social graph, could be laid over this index of knowledge and, uniquely to every individual person, allow all to additionally consider whatever their friends considered relevant. With personal relationships as a keystone to the psychology of trust, the social graph became a new critical dimension to the relevance of available content.

Geospatial

In the years to come, algorithmic and social relevance of content will be supplemented by another human dimension: geography. Already we enjoy many geo-relevant applications (e.g. google maps), but in the future all content should be filterable with reference to a user’s expressed location (I am here), a user’s intention location (I will be or want to say that I am here), and the assigned or determined location value of a piece of content.

–

Applications will be able to cross-reference algorithmic, social, and geospatial relevance. In fact they already can and do. But I suggest that in less than two years this will be ubiquitous. Our product designs and innovations should correspondingly begin embracing and bulilding upon this concept.

What other dimensions of relevance can we add to our searching and finding? How closely does this in fact map to the dimensions of human experience?

Meaning, People, World…. what else? Time, perhaps, could next be more comprehensively organized, as all of history becomes indexed…

(this is a repost from my October 3rd 2008 post on the AOL Design Blog “ControlShift”)

This likely had something to do with my talking to Frank Gruber about an hour beforehand, and Frank’s posting about the same.   I guess TC follows SOMEWHAT FRANK.

I suppose that most folks just now caught wind of what we are doing, but we’ve been developing it in Production (that means available live on the web) since February.  Now that I’m counting it, it’s less than 2 months, but it feels like a four or five…

It is also fun to strategize and plan ways to move the long tail into the high-value web experiences, and begin to see it work.

What’s most exciting (and tense) I think is watching competition.  Love.com is wading in a slew of aggregator broth, or more accurately, sharing a hot-tub of semantic soup with these folks.  My current list is as follows:  .

• Meehive (based on Kosmix)
• Loud3r
• Kosmix
• WNN
• JPZenger
• Evri
• NewsSift
• Alltop
• IceRocket
• Apture

If anyone has any other adds on companies doing this stuff, please send them.  I can be reached at grantcerny ) a t ( gmail.com.  Thanks!!!!

Goom is (or says it will be) “HD sound” programmed internet radio with DJ programming and user-created stations.

I met Zac Bjelgrlic, the CTO for Goom last summer at an OpenID conference.  At the time he worked for BBC and I was trying to network my way into the BBC to find out more about their work on Musicbrainz when he told me he was leaving for Goom.  I followed up with him a couple times, at one point disclosing that we operate AOL Radio and Shoutcast.  We haven’t connected since.

You can sign up for their US beta invite at the bottom of goomradio.com, but why wait for personalization in the US.  Go to goomradio.com/fr or http://www.goomradio.com/goomWeb/home.do to try the product live as it is being marketed in France since it is not effectively georestricted.

The interface and player station-customization is neat.  Not sure how they’ll make the business work.  My sense is that they take a loss on the royalty-bearing DJ programming to motivate people to heavy up on user-gen uploads and playlists and don’t pay royalties on those, and net positive with advertising.

MediaGlow has over 70 brands covering all manner of consumer interest with editorial power and nuance.  Check it out:  www.mediaglow.com.  MediaGlow’s raison d’etre is to find untapped audiences and provide them the media brand and editorial voice that resonates best.

If we call the 70+ sites big rocks (verticals) or small rocks (custom blogs), Love.com’s topic pages provide the scale to fill in the pebbles or sand to attain critical density in covering the spectrum of consumer interest and best serve the largest possible audience or collection of audiences.

Love.com Network is still being born.  Some key near-term goals include:

• Scale to the 100,000s with relevant news, image, video & other media assets returned for each topic.  Topics include celebrities, musicians, movie titles, company names, product names, sports teams, sports players, locations, as well as people who have a critical density of interest in the web
• Make consumers love it and gain audience

We are harnessing some internal IP from Relegence & Blogsmith, and are lucky to have some of the best talent involved in guiding the product direction & architecture and writing very fast java & javascript code  (Ian Holsman, Gregory Tomlinson).  We have the benefit of the very sweet UI/Design of John Kilpatrick, Anabel Gondelles, & Eric Kopicki.  And of course we have the core benefit – the Relegence back end technology – and the knowledge management guidance of Alf Poor and Terence Fitzgerald – in my experience some of the best in their business.

In the months to come we will be adding more and more features and watching traffic and monitoring consumer feedback. I welcome any and all feedback via this channel or others.