This weekend I canvassed for Barack Obama. Prior to last Friday, I didn’t even know what this meant, but after a weekend of attending rallies, stuffing envelopes, making posters and signs, knocking on doors and talking to people in my neighbourhood – I’ve started to get a real sense of what canvassing and democracy is really all about. And I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty amazing thing.

My wife Lauren is completely hooked. She’s been volunteering for the campaign all week and wakes up each morning more excited than the next. At Obama headquarters in Oakland, there’s an amazing energy and spirit in the air. People from all walks of life, from every ethnic group, young and old are walking in there and simply asking what they can do to help. There’s an amazing sense of unity and passion, and a real strong belief that yes, we can do something. We can make a difference. We can change this country, and right its place in the world. All we’ve got to do is stand up for change and make the difference.

I’m a Canadian citizen, so I can’t even vote in this election. But this election is far too important to let something as silly as my own inability to vote stop me from helping out. In Canada, we are constantly complaining about our government and politics, but it’s because they generally treat us very well. The Canadian government provides its citizens with excellent free universal healthcare, great schools and social programs to help those who are going through economic difficulties. We’ve come to appreciate being treated this way – so we speak out whenever there’s something we don’t like.

Up until recently in the United States, it appeared that apathy reigns supreme. It’s so expensive to get elected that politicians end up taking huge amounts of donations from large corporations. Those politicians end up working hard to protect large corporations but ignore the very people they’re supposed to be representing - the citizens of the United States. Americans have become disillusioned with this system and have lost faith in their government. This is really sad, because what happens when people stop caring about politics is that they stop voting and in a democratic system, if you don’t vote – you don’t count. Voting is essential, and you need to vote for someone who will actually represent your interests.

Barack Obama stands alone among the remaining candidates as the one true voice for the change we so desperately need. He’s managed to raise millions of dollars not from large corporate donors, but by reaching out to a broad spectrum of individuals - people like you and me. Moreover, his inspirational message has brought together a wide coalition. Young people in particular are really fired up. The cynical political world of the Bushes and Clintons in Washington almost turned them off politics completely but Obama has brought them back in droves. His appeal crosses all racial and economic divides. In the primaries so far, he’s led all Democratic candidates amongst independents and has even got some Republicans to cross over.

The fact of the matter is that this country is desperate for a candidate that can bring it together. We need to end this bitter partisanship and re-evaluate what we stand for as a nation. Bill Clinton is greatly admired amongst many Democrats and Hillary is a strong, intelligent and very cunning politician. But already in this race, the Clintons have too often embraced Karl Rove style duplicity, and remember - rightly or wrongly Bill Clinton was impeached for having sex with an intern in the Oval Office and then lying about it. Nothing gets apathetic Republicans into a frenzy and foaming at the mouth quite like the thought of Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Barack Obama rises above all of this, and America has progressed enough in the past two decades so that most Republicans would be too ashamed to openly engage in racial discrimination. Many Republicans even begrudgingly admit that while they don’t agree with his politics, they do respect him and think it would be great for America for Barack to become the next president. He is clearly the best candidate the Democrats, or America and even the world could hope for. Please stand up with me and vote for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary tomorrow on Tuesday, February 5th.

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The more popular blogs may be willing to spare their bandwidth in return for the publicity, but for smaller legal blogs like mine it’s just not worth it.

I don’t see how not including your mp3s in your RSS or ATOM feed is stopping anybody from linking to them, but I can empathize with the bandwidth issue and was even a little perplexed about how to address this issue. Thankfully, Lucas was able to set me straight. Standards already exist which allow bloggers to control how web surfers can access their mp3 content, which can effectively stop people from hotlinking to your mp3s if it’s causing you grief. There’s really no reason for anybody to get cranky about it… Here’s how it works:

Direct link from my site works fine

http://musiclibre.org/music/wms/WMS-4_Woolly_Mad_Star_D2.mp3

But if you try to link to it from your site - not so much…

Example third party site copying this link

Here’s the code to get it working for yourself:

Copy the following text into your favourite text editor, replacing yoursite.com with your own domain name.
Save it as filename “.htaccess” and upload it to the directory where you keep your mp3s.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yoursite.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com.*$ [NC]
ReWriteRule .*\.(mp3)$ - [F]

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This is a pretty nerdy subject, so our classification array is zero based.

Level 0 - Total Darkness

Level 0 blogs embed their audio links in bizarre ways, possibly with Javascript or using special hosting services which provide mp3 links with strange URLs which cannot be idenfied as “media”. They may include an ATOM or RSS feed, but their feeds do not contain any enclosures or media links. These blogs are basically useless to the web media developer.

Level 1 - Closed

Level 1 blogs don’t have a recognizable syndication feed in place, however they do embed their audio links in a manner that a web crawler can identify. Example: http://fluxblog.org/. Matt rightly points out that Fluxblog does have an RSS feed, but the problem is it’s not autodiscoverable. You’ll notice there’s no feed icon in FF or IE when you go to visit his site. Who cares right? You just manually add it and never worry about it again? Not really. Completely automated apps (like say how that site Google works) will never see your blog.

Level 2 - Somewhat reserved

Level 2 blogs embed their HTML audio links in a manner that a web crawler can identify as media. (For example, the links end with a .mp3 extension.) They have a recognizable syndication feed in place, however their feed doesn’t provide any media enclosures or links. This means so you can’t consistently link specific tracks to the blog post they appeared in. 

Level 3 - Open

Level 3 blogs have an autodiscoverable syndication feed in place, which contains media enclosure or links. This allows web media developers to associate their media content with the context of the specific post it appeared in. The problem with these blogs is that they do not include the entire content of their posts inside their feed. This means that you can’t reproduce the context in its entirety outside of the original music blog itself. 

Level 4 - Completely Open

Level 4 blogs have a recognizable syndication feed in place which provides the complete blog item content in rich HTML. This can be done with RSS using the content:encoded extension, or in ATOM using the native content element. Your blog will need to be configured to share the full contents of your posts in your syndication feed. Level 4 blogs also embed clean direct links with .mp3 extensions in the URL. Bonus points for using the defacto “Artist - Title” naming standard in their links. Example: http://myoldkyhome.blogspot.com/

Level 4 is pretty much as good as it gets on the web these days. These blogs are doing a great job sharing their content! Total Awesomeness.

use hAudio to have your cake and eat it too

Are you being “closed” because other people are leeching off your site, downloading mp3s and causing you grief when it comes time to pay your web hosting bill at the end of the month?

hAudio will let you be “open” without having to incur any of the potential problems which come with it.

You see - the reason we want you to be open is that we’d like to know exactly who it is you’re blogging about. Until now looking at the mp3 file you link to has been the only way to get this information (and even this doesn’t work very well as mp3 links often stop working pretty quickly). But with hAudio, we don’t need an mp3 file… we just need some good metadata that describes it. We can then use that info to grab the track you’re talking about from some other source. Yes - you can have your cake and eat it too! Check it out!

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I love this exerpt from Wikipedia:

Early in 1995, BBC Radio 3 sent Stockhausen a package of recordings from contemporary artists Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner and Daniel Pemberton, and asked him for his opinion on the music. In August of that year, Radio 3 reporter Dick Witts interviewed Stockhausen about these pieces for a broadcast in October (subsequently published in the November issue of the British publication The Wire), asking what advice he would give these young musicians. Stockhausen suggested they should give up repetitions, which he does not appreciate, which he found to be “like someone who is stuttering all the time.” He further suggested that “one should not serve any existing demands or in particular not commercial values.” Stockhausen was most positive about Scanner’s music, which he found “very experimental, because he is searching in a realm of sound which is not usually used for music”, but felt “he should transform more what he finds. He leaves it too much in a raw state.” Stockhausen suggested an example for each artist from his own works. For Daniel Pemberton, who he criticised for the overuse of tape loops, and whose sense of harmony he found particularly weak, Stockhausen recommended

He should listen to Kontakte, which has among my works the largest scale of harmonic, unusual and very demanding harmonic relationships. I like to tell the musicians that they should learn from works which already [have] gone through a lot of temptations and have refused to give in to these stylistic or to these fashionable temptations… (Witts 1995)

Stockhausen also suggested that Robin Rimbaud, Scanner, listen to his work Hymnen because, although “he has a good sense of atmosphere”, “he should transform more what he finds.”; in the work of Aphex Twin (Richard James), he suggested “changing tempi and changing rhythms”, and that he listen to Gesang der Jünglinge; and, similarly, he found Plastikman (Richie Hawtin) too rhythmically repetitious, and suggested he listen to Zyklus.

The criticised musicians were then invited to respond, and all but Plastikman obliged. Daniel Pemberton was “very impressed considering the time it was done: the 1960s”, but wished that Stockhausen would use more basic repetition: “It would be very good to put some Hip Hop breaks under, actually.” He concedes, “I know what he means about loops though; that’s because I haven’t got much equipment.” Scanner found Hymnen (which he had never heard before) “very good actually—better than I expected. At the end there’s a recording of him breathing. It’s quite uncomfortable—like being inside his head.” As to Stockhausen’s criticisms of his own music, “I take some of what he said about my music to heart”, but he “disagree[s] about repetition: I think, as John Cage said, repetition is a form of change, and it’s a concept you either agree or disagree with. I like repetitions.” Aphex Twin’s reaction to Gesang der Jünglinge: “Mental! I’ve heard that song before; I like it,” but he did not agree with Stockhausen’s critique, in that he wishes Stockhausen would “stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to. . . . You could dance to Song of the Youth[s], but it hasn’t got a groove in it, there’s no bassline” (Witts 1995).

We’ll miss you Karlheinz.

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I sat down to actually work with the Data Store API three weeks ago, and thought that for sure by now there would be plenty of people using it and putting up examples of how easy it was for them on the web. Alas, my web searches were turning up only those same entries that were all written in August. I couldn’t find any practical examples from any one who was actually using it. One of the last entries on the Data Store API discussion page reads, “Good in theory, but not in practice”.

We’re clearly still in the early stages for the API. There are no tools that make it easy to use and working with associations may be a different approach for many people. But once you get your head around it, I actually found it was quite simple to create my data objects using the API Test Console. With the data model in place, it’s easy to post data to from PHP or Flash and you can query your custom tables using FQL. Pretty sweet actually. For the Music Blogs application, this has made a huge impact.

Before using the Data Store API, I was using the Flash Shared Object to save a list of music blogs each user had recently listened to or added as a favorite. This was stored on the users machines which meant it was different from one computer to the next, and there was no way that I could look at or analyze any of the information. It seemed like really interesting data so this was pretty annoying.

This week we went live with an updated version of Music Blogs which now uses the Facebook API for all its storage needs. The change has opened up a whole new social dimension to the application. Users can now see the Top 10 most popular blogs on Facebook, they can browse what their friends have been listening to and they can even read the music blog directly within the app while listening to the music. Thank you Facebook Data Store API. Thank you very much.

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There’s a whole slew of “throwaway apps“, which are really simple, totally spammy and provide a short burst of entertainment value, followed by absolutely nothing. They’re built in a couple hours and go on to get hundreds of thousands of users. I personally find them completely useless - people are literally just stamping out the same app over and over again. But… so far their strategy is working pretty well. I wonder how long this will last.

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http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/11/rudy-giuliani-9.html

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I created this screencast using Camtasia - a pretty great piece of software. This is my second attempt at doing this - the first one I built with Captivate which is cool but doesn’t let you export to anything but SWF… - so I would’ve needed to screencast my screencast if I wanted to keep using Captivate! I must say that creating these videos and not having them totally suck is actually pretty difficult…

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When you first load the app, it randomly chooses one of the most popular music blogs on the web and starts playing back the music. Behind the scenes, the application is crawling that blog, grabbing all the music links and then putting them into this cool new player that we’ve built. If you like what you’re hearing, you can even grab embed codes from Y! Menu in the player and throw it up on your myspace or favourite social network site…

You can skip through the tracks in the player and it will seamlessly transition the music, crossfading the audio from one track to the next. If you like the blog you’re listening to, hit the Add Favorite tab. This will save the blog to your favorites so you can recall it again in the future. It also creates a music blog player on your Facebook profile which will play back the music from the blog you just saved.

There are thousands of great music blogs on the web – and this app provides a really easy way to discover them. Hit the Popular tab and you’ll see a bunch of different blogs to choose from. Click on any of them to start them playing back in the player. If you know a specific blog you’re looking for – use the Look Up feature. Simply enter the first letter of the Blog and then select it from the list. Or you can just choose a page number from the drop down list and try a blog you’ve never heard before.

Click on the Recently Viewed tab and you’ll see all the blogs you’ve listened to recently, so you can refer back to it share your favourites with your friends.

Discovering new music can be pretty addictive. Once you’ve found a set of blogs that you like – Publish them to your profile. You can drag and drop to rearrange them from the “My Favorites” tab. Hit Publish to My Profile and your own personal music blog roll gets pushed to your profile.

So there it is… a fun and easy way to discover new music. I like to think of music blogs like digital mixtapes. The mixtapes aren’t really what’s important – it’s the authors that count. Find a group of music blogs that you like and they’ll keep turning you on to cool, interesting, new music for a long time to come. This is the future of music and it’s here right now. Check it out!

http://apps.facebook.com/musicblogs

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It’s been interesting to watch the progression of the site over the last couple weeks since they released the update. The initial version scrapped their Flash popup player and judging by the feedback, people were not too pleased. They’ve subsequently updated the site to include a popup player which plays all the music links on a given page.

There seems to be a dichotomy in the music blog space. The tradition - as espoused by the Hype Machine is to provide context with the music. The music is an equal to the blog commentary and the two should be packaged together regardless of how or where the actual consumption ends up taking place.

Then there is an entirely different group of people who are really just in it for the music - they can’t be bothered to read or find stuff themselves. They like music blogs for the euphoria of hearing new music and prefer to just listen via the popup player.

The Flash music player we’ve been developing at Yahoo! should appeal to the latter group. You can point it at any webpage, RSS or ATOM feed, or a playlist format like ASX, M3U, PLS or XSPF.

<embed src=”http://webjay.org/flash/xspf_player” width=”100%” height=”220″ wmode=”transparent” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer” flashvars=”playlist_url=http://www.stereogum.com/&rounded_corner=1″ />

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