Stuff I’m into Tuesday
Tuesday, 14 March 2006 by Jacob TomawI have a couple things I am really into this week, IndieFeed and del.icio.us.
IndieFeed is a network of podcasts for independent music. I am subscribed to their Alternative/Modern Rock channel and I really enjoy it. I have been listening for about 6 weeks. Every couple of days it comes out with a new show featuring a new song from an independent alternative/modern rock artist. It is always music I would not have heard otherwise, not because I don’t listen to the radio but because this stuff is not on the radio. All of the music is right on target for the type of music I really like, but it varies from totally kicking to just ok. Some of it has even inspired me to think about buying music again. There is also a little intro and extro commentary telling you a little bit more about the band, more about the album, and the bands website.
There are 4 other music channels at IndieFeed. Alternative/Modern Rock is the only one I have listened to but I recommended Electronica to Rob. He is always looking for more Trance and DJ Mix music. He said he really likes the podcast. They also have Blues/Funk, Folk/Americana, and Hip Hop/Rap music channels. I would like to see an independent country music channel, but maybe there is no such thing and indie country. I also just noticed there are some non music channels, a couple of which I might take a listen to.
So now, every couple of days I get this new music. Ideally I would like to be able to add each of these artists to a station in Pandora. Then if I hear some more from an artist then I can buy it. Also you can look at the list of artists who make up a station really easily. This solution also means I can listen to the music I like anywhere the internet is (i.e. everywhere but a small part of Burnsville, MN). One problem, this is IndieFeed, thus independent artists on tiny labels, thus they are not always in the Music Genome. What am I to do? There is no way I could remember all of these bands and then remember all their websites. I could create a bookmark folder in Firefox and add all the sites in there and then be able to go back and look for new releases and downloads from time to time. However, bookmarks only live in the instance of the browser where they are created. Also, some of the bands are in the Music Genome so I want them in a different categorization.
This is where del.icio.us comes in. Del.icio.us has been around for a little while, but I just started getting into it last week! Not only do I want to categorize the links to bands but I also want to categorize at least a handful of other links every day. Over just the last 4 years of working I have lost the links to more informative programming sites than I want to think about. Everyday Ryan, Eric, or whoever is sending me some site I want to read, just not right now. My old solutions were to im them to myself at home, email them to myself, or to keep a tab open for each article, but, as great as Firefox is, after 30 tabs it starts to get angry with your RAM.
Ok ok ok, so what does del.icio.us do? It lets you tag websites. You give it a web site you love like TFL. Then you give it some keywords you would use to describe the website like ‘tomaw’, ‘blog’, ‘funny’, ‘informative’, ‘mustRead’, and ‘veryWellWriten’. Then you can look up all of the sites you have tagged a certain way. So, I take each of the band’s websites and tag them with ‘band’ and ‘indiefeed’. If the band is not in Pandora, I also tag it ‘nonpandora’. I also tag links I want to read or keep in similar ways. Now when I want to see all the articles I want to read I can just go to my ‘toread’ tag. There is an extension for Firefox that lets you quickly tag your current page and to go to your tags. Also, because this is a web service, it is available everywhere.
There are also more features that I have not explored fully yet, like rss feeds for tags, searching other peoples tags, and tagging for people.
If you have any questions send them my way. Also, if there is a particular type of stuff you would like to hear me talk about let me know.
March 20th, 2006 at 8:15
Hey Jacob
It’s always great to hear about someone who enjoys our Indiefeed Podcasts, thanks for the props and for the referrals, we will be looking into more channels as time progresses, and more ways to get the music logged and working within the entire music ecosystem that music discovery services provide. But you nailed it on the head, current music discovery services are not optimized to encorage new music, especially Pandora-like services that require each new song to be identified and “genomed.” Pandora is a great idea, it has some serious scalability challenges, and that is where tagging may help to have users better manage the content they discover (manual/folk tagging, or some new form that can auto-populate other interesting metadata, such as, say, when/where you got the music).
We are investigating how to bring the best of these functions to emerging independent content, and how to relate that information back to services that everyone would continue to use.
Anyhoo thanks for the interesting conversation and for supporting the programs. By the way, some indie country makes its way on the Americana Roots Folk channel so you might want to check that out
Cheers
Chris from IndieFeed
March 20th, 2006 at 13:19
I love listening to all the new music out. I found you can also go to cdbaby.com and hear songs for free. You don’t have to buy them and you hear most of the song. If something really gets me I’ll buy it. I found a great new independant county (well kinda rockish) band. The James Alan Band
You can hear the music here
http://cdbaby.com/cd/jamesalanband
I’d like to find more feeds to listen to also. Enjoy it on the internet and not just what’s pushed down my throat buy somebody!