Here's a quick blueprint for a grassroots music dissemination network
which works on music files that are linkable and freely available on
the Web.
I want:
- An aggregated display of recently logged songs by people I've subscribed to.
- A nice, big, green
"PLAY" button somewhere that lets me play whatever songs are linked to in my aggregator. - An "I LIKE THIS" button that lets me indicate that I like the
song that's currently playing, pushing its URL into my personal
musiclog (the reBlog idea). - A matchmaking engine that uses my published preferences to point me to other musiclogs I might like
Given the above, I could fire up my aggregator in the morning, start
playing the songs it has collected, reblog whatever I like throughout
the day without going out of my way, and once in a while visit the
matchmaker to find good new DJs to subscribe to.
Implementation thoughts, small pieces loosely joined-style:
- Single-page aggregators like Blogdigger Groups, Rollup or simply Bloglines are perfectly able to handle display if the syndication feeds' formatting is appropriate.
- "PLAY" can be implemented by way of Alf's M3U bookmarklet service, which grabs links to .mp3s from an HTML page and builds a playlist from them. (Try it e.g. here.)
- "I LIKE THIS" button - I don't know of any plugins that log preferences into a syndication feed. The audioscrobbler plugin is closest, and logs into RSS
- or anyways it used to - but it logs everything you play. (I don't
like everything I play, though publishing this can be useful too.) But -
if there were a HTML-based player thingy out there that took a playlist
and simply opened songs one after the other in a browser window, a del.icio.us bookmarklet would do the trick and close the publish/subscribe loop. - Matchmaking could be implemented à la Audioscrobbler. (blogmatcher.com similarly recommends weblogs based on links out of a given weblog and seems to work pretty well.)
This post also appears in the open channelplaylistlogging
[Seb's Open Research]
