October 2008
2 posts
Hard Times
So musedot is offline, for the time being, and it’s not entirely unexpected. I’ve been keeping the lights on by hook or by crook for the past few months, and now I just can’t do it anymore. I do expect to rectify this situation eventually, but it might take a while. In the meantime, the work continues…
Better MP3 Streaming
Since my return to San Francisco I haven’t been able to focus much on musedot, due to a number of dull life-can-be-hard factors that I won’t describe here. However, I just managed to put online the switch to skreemr.com as the mp3 source for the media player. The results are a marked improvement since the skreemr results almost always work, as in they actually play. This means that...
September 2008
1 post
musedot 0.5.1
So I finally got the latest point release online a few minutes ago. This includes the new media player, which was already operational on the main site search but had to be integrated into the miniaturized version of the search engine for the facebook app, the facebook app artist profiles, and the version of the profile that you see when someone sends you a link to an artist. I also added the...
August 2008
2 posts
F*ck B of A
…Bank of America that is. I want to organize a boycott or just smash the windows at their corporate headquarters. I will do neither, but I’ve already envisioned my revenge, other than hassling happless customer service agents (see below). Hopefully, I will manage to raise at least six figures in investor money, and once that’s all sitting nice and pretty in the accounts,...
audit in progress...
The title of this post is a reference to a Hot Snakes album (one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite artists), and that’s what popped into my head when thinking about the still work-in-progress musedot media player. As you can see, I’ve added artist pictures to the search results on the main musedot.com site, and more importantly, a new media player that handles both audio and...
July 2008
4 posts
Life Integration In Progress
I just posted a set of new features for the musedot facebook app that are near and dear to me. Basically the features allow you to track live events for artists you care about. This is a great thing if you, like me, love to see live music. For me personally the coolest and most useful new feature in this set is the artist RSS events feed. Now I can use my trusty google reader to track live...
didn't your mom teach you to share?
I just put the latest sharing options online. You can now share an artist profile via email, facebook, myspace, delicious, and twitter. The twitter option is interesting, you can let your friends know what you’re listening to! I’m personally a bit ambivalent about twitter, but it has potential and is a phenomenon I can’t ignore. You can follow the official musedot twitter...
...and another thing
I thought that after the release of the alpha version of the core search engine and facebook app I would at least be able to take a short break. No dice. It turns out that improving the fb app is an all consuming task. I released what was almost a full rewrite of the app (which is admittedly still quite simple) this past monday. Of course, that only provided the impetus for much more good...
The Next Level: Musedot 0.5
I am music.
I am rock and roll.
I am a descendant of a long, long line of musicians. That ancestral line stretches back hundreds of years and now, I hope, projects forward into modernity. Sound self-congratulatory enough? I’m in a bit of a self-congratulatory mood, despite my near exhaustion.
It’s out! The alpha version of musedot is now online and I’m actually feeling...
March 2008
1 post
Much Better!
I just switched this blog to tumblr today and am liking it much better than the old and cranky live journal system. This is much simpler and intuitive, and has clearly superior multi-media options.
December 2007
1 post
Musedot 0.1
I just released the very first publicly available version of the musedot.com search/exploration two days ago. This represents months of work, mainly by yours truly, but with very significant and appreciated contributions by young Daniel Chan. I’m most proud that we actually managed to build a search engine literally from scratch, after much puzzling through the research I conducted on the...
August 2007
1 post
The Theoretical Foundation of Musedot
The consumption of music is a highly personal and subjective activity that has not and cannot be adequately served by algorithmic approaches based on subjective musical taxonomic systems (Pandora), listening habit aggregation and analysis (last.fm), rudimentary social-network sharing (MySpace), or purchase histories (Amazon.com and others). In my opinion, all these approaches are fundamentally...
June 2007
2 posts
Hey, I Already Said That!
Here’s an interesting article from Slate that is in agreement with my analysis (previous post) that Facebook has a good chance of crushing MySpace http://www.slate.com/id/2168872
Musedot and the Future
The following is back story information about Musedot that DeAngela requested from me and which I thought might be good to share with the rest of the family. Musedot Mission: To use Internet technology to help you find music that you would like if only you knew about it. Is Musedot a Social Music Network?: “Social Music Network” is an interesting concept and one put forth by...
May 2007
1 post
AOL Redux:Or Why MySpace is a Piece of Crap
First, a bit of history. I’ve been an entrepreneur in Interweb-related businesses since around 1995. Unlike many of you fresh faced kids, I can remember a once mighty colossus of a business that was called America Online at the time. You may be surprised to know that at one point way back in the early days of this whole phenomenon, America Online was the undisputed monster and dominator...