Sharing your music through radio.blog.club

A couple of weeks ago I met a a nice guy in a social picknick that told me about radio.blog.club (Thanks François!). The idea is great. They are building a pear to pear streaming network. Basically, they provide the software that allows you to stream music from your server to clients.

You can use radio.blog.search in two ways:

• You can create your own music server that will stream music to users. The software is provided by radio.blog.club but you need to look for it in the forums, I have not seen any other access to it.
• You can search in their website for songs that are stored in user servers, build your playlist and listen to it. The player they supply will automatically stream the music from the appropriate server to your client.

I guess the way it works is that when a user adds a music server, radio.blog.club is notified so they can tell their crawler to look and index all the songs stored on that server (well, there is a configuration file you can use to tell radio.blog.search not to index and share your songs). That way users can search for indexed songs through the website and play them directly from the servers where they are stored. Doesn’t sound great?

I have used it for a couple of days and I works pretty well. Some of the songs in my playlist cannot be accessed, I guess that’s because the servers are no longer there or because they don’t have enough bandwidth.

I think it is a good start but it could be optimized by factorizing songs. Currently, if you look for a song you will get one result per server with that song. I guess it will be better to show just one result and load balance requests across the different servers behind the scenes.

The site also needs some rework maybe to improve the process of building your playlist (I don’t know how to change the order of songs in the playlist for instance). In any case it looks like a very interesting product.

All that said, it looks to me that this might not be completely legal … Well, is like sharing your music with friends and it does not look that different from Kazaa or other p2p networks. But for the time being, just enjoy it!

More and more information. Who has the time to look for it?

With the proliferation of the read/write web, the Internet has become an enormous space holding too much information. In my previous post I talked about the concept of solidary community intelligence raising the issue of interaction and how information should be organized.

A possible solution to the problem is the combination of a “Content Hub” and a “Personalized Content Dispatcher”.

The main function of the “Content Hub” is to scan sources of information supplied by users and to extract new content as it appears. That way all the content can be queried and accessed through a single query. That’s something search engines. Thanks God we have them!

The “Personalized Content Dispatcher” goes one step forward, delivering to users the information they are interested in. And I say deliver, push rather than pull. Of course, you can always go to a search engine and search for the information you are interested in, but user profiles are quite complicated and so they involve too many different queries. Moreover, users do not usually have time to go and search that information, let alone go again and again through the same results to find a new relevant result. That’s why we need an intelligent way to look for that information in the “Content Hub” and personalize the delivery on a user’s basis with a “Personalized Content Dispatcher”.

There will still be a master piece missing that will enrich the system: “Intelligent Content Discovery”. What the hell does that mean you may ask. The answer is pretty simple, the system MUST suggest new sources of content to users based on their profile. That way, the system takes care of everything, users just need to define their profile, that is, what kind of information they are interested in (well, we could build profiles through a more complex process based on other information provided by users). The “Intelligent Content Discovery” could also use profile matching algorithms to group people in communities sharing the same interests and propose new content to users, by investigating the different sources defined by all the community users and that are not shared by all of them. This is something that I think we will start to see more and more in the near future as users contribute with more information to the community.

That’s the sort of problems we are trying to solve at 2or3things and for which we plan to provide solutions before the end of the year.

I’ll keep you posted.

Following the buzz

I don't know whether someone knows of a site that tracks each and every site that is showing off. Everybody following the web 2.0 wave is probably reading techchrunch, o'reilly radar, web 2.0 explorer, etc, etc. There are also web 2.0 applications to propagate and follow the buzz like buzzshout.

There is actually a site that tries to track all emerging web 2.0 start-ups: NEO Binaries. As a brand new entrepreneur, I sometimes find all this information overwhelming. If you run a search on the domain of your future product, there is a high probability you will find some competitors already. Maybe many of them.

I am not an expert in business strategy, nor do I have a related degree, but it seems to me that in traditional markets having some competition is not necessary a bad thing, because if some companies are already there, there is actually a market for your product. If you need to find and educate the market on your own you will have to invest a lot of money and effort.

In the world of web 2.0 this doesn't need to be true. Why? Well, creating a new internet application does not necessarily need a very important investment upfront, therefore anybody with some knowledge of programming and an idea can build an application in a very short time and make it available. This person has not probably made any (extensive) analysis of the market because it is expensive, so it is cheaper to build the application and see what happens.

What I am trying to point out is that following the buzz is very time consuming (it's is easy to expend half of the day reading blogs about new exciting websites) and not necessarily very productive because it is difficult to come out with good conclusions.

My advice is read one or two blogs at most so you stay tuned, but don't spend a lot of time on it, it is not worth it.