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Link /// Twitter revenue
Ethan talks about using Twitter as a $1/month private fanclub news source, which is kind-of interesting but I have a real distaste for the whole ‘monetized fanclub’ thing which a few people have tried (Bloc Party and the Mighty Boosh both come to mind).
Surely the way to reward your hardcore fans isn’t to try and charge them for it?
Link /// Pitchfork Feature: Radiohead: "Nude RE/MIX"
Ok, I realise I’ve gone on about this a little too much, but this is a nice little summary of the whole thing and highlights some of the best mixes (although I’m sure there are still some hidden gems waiting to be found).
Link /// Mirror's Edge Trailer
Mirror’s Edge is a fully first person action game coming soon for the Playstation 3, and it seems to have finally cracked the ‘floating camera with no legs’ problem most first person perspective games seem to suffer from:
Link /// When the fall is all that’s left
I couldn’t agree more; Mozilla’s attitude stinks, and has for a long time.
Link /// Albert Hammond Jr
Lovely little site we’ve just launched for Albert Hammond Jr – it’s just a mailing list signup for the time being but we thought we’d spice that up by letting you upload a photo at the same time, which we using million dollar homepage style to make the background of the site.
Link /// Monotone Wordpress Theme
I really like the idea of automatically sampling colours from an uploaded photo to theme a web page. Obviously the hat tip has to go to Mezzoblue, but making it automatic opens up some interesting possibilities.
Link /// Adobe’s Open Screen Project: Write Once, Flash Everywhere
Well, at least Silverlight has been useful for something – Adobe has opened up the Flash specification, paving the way for much greater Flash support almost everywhere. What I’d really like to see is for Apple to write their own Flash plugin – much like they have with PDF – that isn’t quite so rubbish (and runs on iPhones as well).
Link /// Record Labels Strategically Invest $2.8M in MOG
Universal is really investing in the music orientated social network space, which makes a lot of sense – they must spend a very significant amount of money on both advertising on social networks and effort in trying to get good promotional placement on them. It’s pretty unnerving though – you don’t want the market leader (with about 33% total market share) controlling – what is essentially – the presses.
Link /// Last.Fm personal wallpaper generator
Generates a desktop picture collage of albums you’ve listened to on Last.fm. Read: totally awesome.
Link /// An Ephemeral Site: Denna Jones
Lovely work (both the site design and its content), and it’s interesting to see another site that uses CakePHP and SimplePie to pull in content from outside sources (which is what we do on xlrecordings.com).
Link /// YouTube in MP4 via QuickTime Plugin!
A simple bookmarklet that magically turns a video on youtube from low-quality Flash into high quality quicktime. Doesn’t work on all videos apparently, although it’s worked with all the ones I’ve tried.
Link /// Video Comments on WordPress Blogs
Another takeaway message is: video is coming, and it will be everywhere.
No, it’s not; video is not going to ‘take over’ from text anymore then podcasts took over from blogs (which lots of people were claiming would happen at the time). Yes online video is important and will get increasing use as the technology becomes easier to implement, but the web is primarily a text based medium and is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Link /// Facebook Chat Now Works For Everyone
I’m actually very impressed with Facebook Chat – while it’s obviously not revolutionary they’ve done it right. Of course, what I’d really like is Jabber support so I can use it in Adium/iChat, but I’m not sure if that really meshes with Facebook’s strategy of keeping everything on site (hence no RSS feed for the news feed, for example).
Link /// Embed your data- in HTML 5
This looks very useful – while you can sort of do this already in xhtml using custom namespaces that’s a bit complicated; this looks far easier. Also, it could also be used nicely for microformats and the like (and get rid of that darn abbr pattern).
Link /// Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business
I think the concept of streaming and embedable music (that is paid for by either direct advertising or a royalty structure) is definitely the future of music on the web. However, it’s worth noting that I think this is a companion to traditional digital retailers, not a replacement.
Link /// Sonific Heading To The Deadpool: Record Labels Blamed
Note to startups: don’t base your entire business model on other peoples content that you don’t have the rights to use.
Link /// No CSS Reset
I completely agree – I don’t ever use a CSS reset style sheet. It seems like far too much hard work putting back in all the styling you’ve overridden, not mention that if you’re using a CMS you’re going to have to make sure that you’ve got everything that someone could enter (uls, dls, blockquotes etc) covered.
Link /// Grooveshark Launches Awesome Streaming Music Service
You know what? This is actually pretty good, and has one of the best flash-based interfaces I’ve seen in quite a while.