Saturday, October 28, 2006

Not Your Father's Napster: Sharing Music With NapsterLinks

Napster released a feature to allow the spread of tunes and (hopefully) the acquisition of subscribers. Here it is in the Plain-Old-HTML version. Also comes in IM/Email and Mini-Player flavors.

Wolvesville - Manuel Barrueco (with Steve Morse). An Improvisation On Etude No.1 by Villa-Lobos

(And, btw, that's one of the worlds sweetest/toughest classical guitarists in an improvised duet with the former lead guitarist of The Dixie Dregs)

Unfortunately, as a viral-driven acquisition tactic, it's so heavily laden with Napster Free Trial up-sell, that much of the fun, let alone the utility, of sharing media has been sucked out. Whether the goal was to leverage viral effects to boost subscriber acquisition, or generate lots of in-bound links, it won't make a dent.

One more thing, depending on your browser settings, you may have to "allow pop-ups from Napster.com" in order to hear the track I've linked to above. I could have posted the Mini-Player right in this blog post, but Blogger doesn't allow javascript functions to run in this, or any, blog.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Blogging At The Speed Of SMS: Twitter Releases An API

I'm sure SMS blogging will soon take its place next to web-based blogging and perhaps one day render it obsolete. SMS blogs have the potential for so much more urgency and immediacy - the universe of applications for sending dispatches from the heart of whatever-scene-you-like (once bloggers realize the potential of severing themselves from the computer) is mind numbing. And now Twitter has released an API to speed the process along. Best Twitter-based application so far? Twittermap.