Filed under Media Web

Socializing Songbird

By stevel stevel

The social aspects of Songbird have always been intriguing to me. Some of our recent add-ons (such as Shareaholic, and the newly uploaded Me.dium) have started exploring how social networks can start to be tied into the Songbird experience. Songbird’s browser aspect can, of course, naturally do the usual web browser interface to social networks… but an extension like Me.dium that makes browsing the web a social experience has always seemed more interesting to me in that it requires less *conscious* effort to share what I’m doing.

I was super-psyched to meet a couple of the Me.dium devs when they came out to our last Songbird DevCamp where they, armed with our Developer Centre references, and documentation, made quick work out of building in Songbird support.

Music is inherently a social activity… we discover new music by seeing what artists our friends are listening to, and by recommendations from trusted sources. With Me.dium, you get that in both the browser context, and now in the media library context. Anyway, go check out Me.dium at their Me.dium site, or install their Songbird add-on and add some friends (I’m ‘donuthole’ on the network), and start exploring and sharing your music listening and browsing experience.

Media Web Meetup tonight!

By stevel stevel

Holy crap, I totally forgot to blog that we’re having the fourth Media Web Meetup tonight at our nest!

This month we’ve decided to talk about mashups from a musical point of view. We’re bringing in some pretty awesome DJs (DJ Earworm and Kid Kameleon) to demo, talk about what tools they use online to find, create, mashup, distribute and promote their music and what really irks them about the current state of the web.

Rob Lord will help tie this back to technology, the open media web and mashups online and how this can address some of this.

6pm (yes that’s in 2 hours) at our office!

What I meant to say…

By roblord roblord

FYI, a recent and otherwise on-point LinuxWorld article on Firefox and XULRunner article misquoted me at the end.

My comment was that Mozilla Firefox browser gained market-share at the expense Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox’s early success was propelled by its open source, open standards and Open Web approach, while Microsoft Internet Explorer’s proprietary, single vendor solution stagnated. Duh. =)

Thanks to Paul Kim at the Mozilla Foundation for catching it.

Rob

Happy New Year!

By jkoshi jkoshi

Happy New Year

Birdwatchers, ‘birders, builders, and bird friends,

Thank you for making 2007 a great year for Songbird. Your continued support has helped make our project a success. Your growing numbers are also a sign of our growing popularity, keep spreading the word! Meanwhile, we’ll be hard at work at improving both the ‘bird and the ‘nest for your Open Media Web consuming pleasure.

Much thanks and a Happy New Year,
Koshi.

Portable Playlist Panel Powwow (12/11 @ 5pm!)

By stevel stevel


Songbird is hosting the next in our series of Media Web Meetups next Tuesday, December 11th.

This one promises to be awesome; we’ve got some heavyweights in the realm of portable playlists coming over to have a panel discussion about the future of how music lovers are going to listen to their media on the go.

On the panel so far: Tantek Çelik (former Chief Technologist of Technorati, and microformats expert), Lucas Gonze (XSPF and portable playlist guru), Scott Kveton (Open Technology Lead at MyStrands) and Tom Conrad (CTO of Pandora).

Wow! How star-studded is that cast?

The panel starts at 6pm at our offices here at 585 Howard, but Lucas will be giving a one hour talk on XSPF and the history of portable playlists to provide some context to the panel at 5pm.