Cubicgarden.com
Counting from a few posts ago, I’ve been thinking…
A while ago I suggested to Mixcloud the concept of mobile playlists tailored for Mixes, but they didn’t really see the point. But recently I suggested the same thing to Dirty Si and he was a lot more receptive to the concept. Right now when I do a mix, I tend to create a piece of metadata to go with the mix. The NFO file (yep straight out of the darknet) contains the playlist order and any other metadata I feel is required. I would use PLS, M3U or even XSPF but I’ve just done something to scratch my own itch. I might switch to using XSPF with a namespace for my own metadata and add the SMIL namespace. There’s a whole bunch of hacking which needs to be done in this area…
Playlists do not equal mixes…
I’ve been thinking about this even more recently since Google and Amazon’s music locker systems.
Everyones been thinking about singles or albums. But I’m thinking way beyond that. What about mixes? Imagine if the necessary metadata was in place to create extra special experiences around mixes?
But why even mess around with the metadata when you can mess with the actual mix its self?
The Pacemaker (for example) right now, stores the actions of the dj and then recreates the mix using the tunes on the host machine. I’m wondering if you could grab that data and turn it into something like MIDI then you could really do some revolutionary things to dj mixes.
Would it be possible to setup a Amazon EC2/Google app instance which could read the midi data and use the raw tunes to create a stream in real time? What effect would this have on listen to mixes?
Once again, I’d really like to hack around with this stuff if I had the time.
Evan Prodromou who I finally met at FOSDEM recently, has been running a poll to find out whats the best character limit for microblogging.
For our flagship site, Identi.ca, which runs on the status.net cloud service and uses the 0.9.0 beta, we’d like to open up the discussion of what an appropriate character limit should be. Setting a site-wide limit is a community decision we’d like to leave in the community’s hands. In a conversation on Identi.ca we’ve solicited some candidate character limits that we’d like people to decide on.
- 140 is compatible with Twitter; in many languages a notice with 140 characters fits into a single SMS message*
- 280 can fit into two Twitter or SMS messages
- 300 is a fan favorite
- 420 is Facebook’s status limit and 3 Twitter tweets or SMS messages
- 500 is a little bigger
- 1000 is bigger than that
- Unlimited
- Other
So personally I think 300 is enough. 300 will hold a very long URI with room for query string values. Also having it about the size of two text messages seems about right. If you stick to ANSI only characters you usually get about 306 characters to text with (160+160 with overhead) on most phones. Unicode drops it down to 280 characters which still seems fairly close to 300. I’m also thinking 300 characters keeps things micro readable still.
The idea of a more structured microblogging with URIs as metadata in interesting but I think metadata should be inline and in plain view. Its one of the neat things about Microblogging, which would be a shame to remove. Also got to say anything more complex than the current microblogging setup would maybe cause too many problems with backwards compatible. Literate results are good, if you want metadata use blogging instead.
