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!

In the beginning of any given year there are all of these prophets, false- and otherwise, who rally to make predictions for the upcoming year.  What they’re all looking for is the “next big thing.”

I had a few ideas about what the next big thing for 2010 would be, which informed my judgment as I found myself personally preoccupied with my own next big thing since December 2009.   Fact is, last December I made the very difficult decision to part from the AOL mothership, wherein I’ve grown, and built, and helped build, and where I loved and was loved by many, for the past 5 1/2 years.  My decision is a personal one; I am as bullish for AOL as ever, and even today spent an hour on AOL Music’s CD Listening Party devouring the new RJD2 album… AOL’s leadership and strategy is strong, and as a leaner, now-public company, I believe AOL will thrive.  But I knew that for me, even so, there was a “next thing” banging around in my head, and I took some time to think about what was a “next big thing.”

Many options suggested themselves to me, including major media, startups, consulting, and entrepreneurship.  I put my toe into a few of these options in the past month.

Where I landed, though, was a somewhat familiar place — KickApps!  I’ve been working with Mike Sommers and Alex Blum over the past few years to try to find the right cocktail of KickApps with AOL, and so already had a great understanding of the platform and the people.  After some quick thought, it made a whole lot of sense.  Yes, starting in February I’ll be joining up with the KickApps team to push the next phase in the social media revolution.  I couldn’t be more excited.

KickApps is positioned with the platform and the capabilities to superserve all web publishers including enterprise to entry-level brand marketers, small business owners, individuals and communities of all varieties, with all of the core publishing, social, and media capabilities needed, with no need for an IT staff to stand it up.   In addition they have already fostered a huge developer community – critical to expanding reach and innovation.  And there is much more potential as well in connecting inter-community data with connected, non-KickApps datasets.   KickApps has done a hell of a lot in the past 3 years or so but I’m looking forward to doing a lot more.

For those who know the focus I put into working on data availability and community engagement (AIM integrations in Streampad with Dan Kantor, the Music Usage Database, message boards & comments social syndication, 3rd party delegated authentication, Love.com) and the real-time web (Love.com, Relegence-powered newstreams, etc.) over the past year and change, know that for me, the “Next Big Thing” on the Web really is enabling the global brain of social consciousness to be more quickly and consistently connected – to increase the saturation potential in the world we all live in, and to deliver to each one of us tools enabling us to extract the most from our four dimensions of experience –  semantic relevance, social relevance, geospatial relevance, and timeliness — with maximum effectiveness in minimum time.  The NOW Generation is now, like right now, or as my South African ex-housemate Erich Maritz might have said some 12 years ago, “not just now, but now now“.

For right now, I’m confident that I know what the next big thing is – and ready to make it bigger.  It’s an irresistible opportunity to join with a very talented team, with a very effective and proven platform, and be a part of what I am sure will be a great success in 2010 and beyond.

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.

When we were walking up to the field, a catcher on another game stood up and yelled loud “Michael Jackson has left the building!”  A buzz went around, people saying that Michael had died.  Again it seemed unbelievable, and random jokes went around that it was a hoax to relieve the troubled star from his upcoming European tour.  By the time we were settled in at the bench, the sad truth was confirmed… indeed Michael had passed away.   The game was about to start.  We warmed up for five minutes, and the umpire called game on.  We grouped up to cheer and chose to cheer for Michael.

I had already discovered that I was doing a really cold start for anything athletic, having not worked out in the area of sprinting, or throwing, or any sort of quick-twitch action, in…. well a really long time.   The warmup had already got my hamstrings ready to seize.   Our coach Jake smartly moved me from right field to first base, where I was much more comfortable not having to run so much, but ready to catch and throw.  The game began and we started off smart, one of our guys Tony stealing home in the first inning and holding back the opponents with a zero.  Things changed quickly after that.  The other team, clearly, were not as motley and either had great experience or had actually practiced a bit.   I found that I enjoyed myself a lot, even while we worked our way to a spectacular loss of 15 to 1.  While doing my best to focus, be ready for the quick catch, and doing all I could to coax my 36 year old office-bod into base-running sprints, I marvelled at playing a game in Central Park for the first time, in a verdure of green with actual spectators watching, surrounded by tall buildings beyond the trees, and rediscovering the baseball I had last played in high school 20 years ago.

After the game we checked our devices and got caught up on the story.  Everything was confirmed, indeed Michael had passed, creating a double tragedy to a day starting off with the passing of Farrah Fawcett who had bravely battled cancer for so long.  Apparently while we played the game, a lot of controversy had ensued between the people who had openly voiced opinions about hoax-theory as we had jokingly done on our way to the field, and the people who indignantly replied with later, better information about the sad truth.

I joined the team for a couple celebratory — even though we lost abysmally — beers, which we raised to the departed, then I headed home to my suburban life and family, including doing baby-duty til now.   All in all, I have to say that the diversion from the ordinary in the way of softball was really wonderful, and made a bit surreal by the surrounding tension of a world responding to several losses of  significant magnitude, certainly worse than losing 15 to 1.

You enter the office and it’s comfy chairs, brick walls, screen projection, make your way past a large floor of production desks (which were shielded for the party by big taut colored fabric dividers), then to the far side where there is a big space.  Music was spun by YouTube DJ, George (I didn’t get his card so don’t have his last name), playing an awesome mix of electronic and nostalgia, and everyone I talked to agreed with me that the music was right on.  I wanted to hook in my laptop and download it, it was that good.   Moving on:  then there’s a Scandinavian-style kitchen, with a beer tap, which was flowing with microbrew provided by Six Points Brewery.  Then you move further beyond the kitchen and there’s an elevated stage, with windows that look north up Lafayette.  Perfect for preparing product presentations, perfect for embarrassing karaoke, or anything else toward which a stage lends life.

What’s more, Blip is doing great business, and all the best in video were there to celebrate and network.  I met guys from Boxee and TubeMogul and a new group called Branded Evolution.  Hundreds of folks I didn’t meet.  Well done on the office move, Blip!  And thanks for the party!

* “migrating west” is a newly-coined vanity expression for commuting home on NJ transit to New Jersey.

“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!!!!

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.