Practice in Context

Research on RSS and Wiki’s

kryptou — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:53:38 +0000

RSS

RSS is initialism for Really Simple Syndication. It is a group of web feed formats used to publish regularly updated digital content, such as weblogs, podcasts or news feeds. RSS is a simple way for users to keep updated automatically on websites and web content that interests them. Instead of having to go to the websites to check if new content or articles are available you can use RSS and get notified automatically every time something new is available.
DJDownload now offers RSS feeds for each of its dance genre’s and a general feed for breaking news so that you can know the second a new track or label is added to give you the inside track & keep you one step ahead of the pack!
There are a number of ways you can make use of RSS: you can download a program called a News Reader which displays RSS feed information, you can use a web based RSS Reader or you can use the built in RSS Features of Mozilla’s Internet browser – Firefox.

All you then have to do is decide which RSS feeds interest you, for instance an RSS feed of all the latest Progressive & Tribal news & an RSS feed of all the latest House news, and then subscribe to these feeds.

Wiki

Wiki is a website that permits users to add, remove, and edit content. A collaborative technology for organizing information on Web sites, WikiWikiWeb developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s was the first wiki. Wikis allow for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is one of the best-known wikis.

The Hype Machine – What’s all the Hype About????

kryptou — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:04:33 +0000

Created by Anthony Volodkin in 2005 ‘The Hype Machine’ has proved a huge success by providing a wonderful tool for music enthusiasts and web surfers to explore the blogosphere for music related content. His work has recently won Mashup Camp 3’s award, and has attracted a lot of attention from many web developers as well as music lovers. So what’s it all about?

The Hype Machine is an online aggregator of music blog posts from the extremely large blogosphere of the web. With links to Amazon sales data and upcoming gigs, and an integrated Flash music player to output the MP3 files that have been talked about in the various blogs, hypem.com is quickly becoming the site to visit to check out music that is being written about on the web.
The beauty of The Hype Machine (apart from the fact that it is a competent aggregator) is that it can search and stream a plethora of MP3 files by various artists via its own search engine and MP3 player. The player uses a new open playlist format called XSPF and the Flash player is based on the extremely versatile XSPF Music Player. The Hype Machine also includes an awesome hacked integration with iTunes that takes you right from the displayed web page to the track you’re interested in purchasing. If you’d rather opt to buy through Amazon, The Hype Machine cleverly takes the user to the display of the CD page at Amazon.com.

How Does it Work?

The Hype Machine tracks and aggregates a variety of MP3 blogs. Posts containing MP3 links are tracked, and those links are automatically affixed to its database and displayed on the site’s homepage.
The blog that posted a particular track is distinguishable under every track by name and with a “read>>” link that connects to the weblog post itself. Other links that feature alongside the track are links to Amazon and iTunes stores.

Other Cool Features

The Hype Machine features an online radio broadcast called ‘Hype Radio’ that is powered entirely by blogs. The broadcast comprises of a continuous stream of MP3 tracks that have recently been written about in the blogs listed on the Hype Machine. It can be defined as Internet radio “that’s truly powered by the Internet”.

kryptou — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:44:30 +0000

Virgin Radio – Pushing the boundaries through use of Web 2.0

kryptou — Tue, 29 May 2007 01:18:04 +0000

Virgin Radio’s website is a good example of an operation brimming with features and interactive capabilities that was just not possible via traditional terrestrial radio. The audio-visual communication of information on its site is immense with web-cams streaming live footage of the DJs presenting their shows, an abundant amount of links to popular music news, viewable playlists for all the broadcast programs, and access to its vast archive of music videos and tracks. To top it all off is their ‘Interact’ section whereby listeners can sign up and interact with the DJs and the other online listeners via forums, web-cams, blogs, bulletin boards, phone-in shows etc.

Below is an captured screen-shot image of Virgin Radio’s Webcam Window

Below is an captured screen-shot image of Virgin Radio’s Interact Central Activity Window

In fact, it is possible to say that Virgin Radio has successfully created an internet radio site with powerful social networking features based around the types of music it plays. I’ve explored the site a few times and came across a feature of the site which I thought was particularly good for social networking – Fan Forums.
Virgin Radio’s Fan Forums is a special set of forums dedicated to talking about the music of a specific artist or band. The first thing that the user is expected to do in ‘Fan Forums’ is to find and click on the forum of the band or artist that s/he is interested in joining. The artist/band names are alphabetically listed and pretty long in length. Once you’ve clicked on the link to a particular artist, you are taken to the Fan Forum of that artist. On the homepage of the forum you will most probably see a list of topics that users are commenting about, such as ‘your favourite (artist name) song’ or ‘favourite band member’ etc. You have to be a logged-on Virgin Radio member to leave comments and start posting forum topics however.
This type of online interaction with other members is a brilliant way to connect with people who share the same music interests as you do. If they share the same music interests as you then chances are they share other interests too which makes the relationship more fun and exciting. Well done Virgin!!!
Virgin must be very proud of their site and the success they have been getting with their online content. Virgin’s James Cridland boasts of the site’s

“…scope for giving people more information about what they are listening to, which we’ve certainly found a very useful part. In terms of interaction, an example is our evening phone-in show – we tried a web chat with them last week, where essentially all the listeners could listen online and comment on what they were hearing. That was certainly a real success, both from the point of our listeners talking to other listeners and feeling much more involved, but also we know from the research that night that people actually tuned in longer as a result. People were telling their friends about it as well. I see the interaction bringing together a community spirit – it works so well with other websites on all areas of life, and there’s certainly no reason why it shouldn’t work on Internet Radio as well.”

The Advantages of Internet Radio

kryptou — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:29:45 +0000

Internet radio has a strong advantage over its terrestrial cousin merely by the fact that it can be broadcast to computers and other devices located in far-reaching parts of the world. Fresh new music from Seattle can be heard in London for example, and a live commentary of a baseball match in Japan can be heard in Germany. This is all possible because of the Internet and the technologies that are deployed on it.
The Internet is a global network of computers capable of retrieving, storing, and disseminating various types of data over relatively large distances. It is therefore not surprising to see that many Internet radio stations are offering a lot more than just an aural experience. Lets face it, there is little new in the experience that is – ‘listening to a radio program via a device’, apart from the way and the distances that audio data from net-radio stations are being delivered to their listeners.
Many net-radio stations are using the multimedia platform that is the Internet as a medium to communicate, and make accessible to the user a lot more entertainment and information than ever before. Even very small stations are using the services of net-radio aggregating websites such as shoutcast so that their station can be listed, searched for, categorized, and most importantly – listened to.

An introduction to Internet radio

kryptou — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:34:14 +0000

Simply-put, Internet radio, net-radio, or e-Radio as it is also known as is audio broadcasting over the Internet. The actual operation of this is referred to as webcasting (although the term does refer to both broadcasting of audio or video over the net) since content in this scenario is transmitted via the world wide web instead of the more traditional wireless technologies such as Frequency Modulation (FM). Today, the term ‘Internet Radio’ has developed into several meanings, and many people associate it with services as diverse as on-demand audio streaming from on-line music retailers to ‘blog radio’ – services such as The Hype Machine that aggregates and streams many mp3 audio files automatically and randomly from the music blogosphere…more about blog radio later.

Many major terrestrial radio stations stream via the Internet in real-time along with their regular AM or FM over-the-air broadcasts in order to reach a wider audience. This type of broadcasting is called simulcasting (a simultaneous broadcast of a program over more than one medium). However, a lot of net-radio content comes from broadcasters who only broadcast over the Internet. Today, it is estimated that the number of Internet radio stations is in five figures. Below is a video found on YouTube.com of a DJ called Brian Aneurysm broadcasting on a well known net radio station called Play.FM

Many stations also stream recordings of previous broadcasts that are stored in their archives. In this case they will be providing an “On-Demand” service, a service that is used to request and stream audio from an archive to the client computer. Play.FM features such a service on their website. Other industries that utilize audio-on-demand services are on-line music retailers. Many outlets offer a “listen before you buy” service, whereby the potential customer can stream a short sample of a track to his/her computer for listening purposes. One example of such a site is chemical-records.co.uk.

Audio streaming and net-radio

Most Net-radio broadcasters utilizes a streaming media and streaming technology, which presents listeners with a continuous stream of audio. If the stream is broadcast live (in realtime) the listeners have no or very little control over the stream. In other words they can open the stream in a software media player such as iTunes and terminate its playback, but apart from this they cannot control what is listened to or the sequence of how it is played back. In this sense it is very similar to traditional radio broadcasting. However, if the stream is a recording of a past broadcast then it can be streamed anytime from the beginning and played-back in a non-linear fashion.

Streaming audio is a one-way audio transmission over a data network. It is widely used on the Web to deliver audio broadcasts as well as audio on demand. Many private intranets also make use of streaming technology to deliver audio and video content. Unlike audio files such as WAV and MP3 that are played-back after they are downloaded from a server, audio that is streamed is played almost instantaneously after requesting it from a server, and the data that is pumped through to the client’s computer is not stored permanently on that client computer’s storage device. If you open a stream in a media player such as iTunes the player will only playback that stream if you are connected to the Internet…well apparently, so I’m told.

My Research Topic

kryptou — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 04:12:43 +0000

I have DJed various styles of dance music for over 15 years and so I’m naturally interested in most things “DJ” whether they are developments in DJ technology or DJ performances in clubs or on the radio. Although I have been aware and interested in the growing Internet radio scene over the last 5 years or so I feel that my lack of personal connectivity to the Internet from my home has really hindered me from listening in and researching the scene. It has only been of late when I finally managed to get myself online that I started tuning in to net radio stations such as UKrumble.com and BBC 1xtra online.
Because I have studied computer networking in the past my interest in net radio isn’t merely about finding the good stations and the good shows on those stations but how internet radio stations were transmitting content to their audience, and the steps involved in setting up a radio broadcast. With the advent of the now standard in audio formatting for storage and transmission over the Internet (MP3) and podcasting came the revolutionary changes to the way we bought, accumulated, listened to, and syncronized with audio content that is online. This coupled with the advancements and possibilities that came through the movement that is commonly known as ‘web 2.0′ breathed life into the content that at one point in time could have been considered to be very static, and made this content buzz with a contemporaneous aura.
I want to use the opportunity that this study module offers me to research the topic of radio broadcasting over the Internet, and in particular if and how the Internet radio scene is embracing the use of web 2.0 to make the radio experience online a new and exciting way to experience music and a whole lot more. As well as researching these topics i will be finding out through using the WordPress blogging platform how to present and link my work to other people’s work through use of various web 2.0 technologies such as RSS and mashups. Below is a outline of the areas that I wish to cover through my research.

The history of net-radio from its origins through to its pioneers and developers. I will briefly research the history of radio in this section, and relate this to how it has affected the Internet radio scene.
Net-radio functionality – How it works and what is involved in setting up a net-radio broadcast – I will be researching this from a technical viewpoint, as well as looking at some of the different approaches to acheiving a broadcast. I will also research institutions such as Shoutcast and Live365 that are involved in providing various net-radio services.
Net-radio today – How and to what extent is it impacting on society? How has it integrated into the Internet and the social computing structures of it? I will discuss the growth and affects of this phenomena on various industries such as the music, media, and electronics industries.
Lastly, I will be finding out about the various contentious issues surrounding the practice that is net-radio hosting and broadcasting. I will be looking into how politics are having an affect on the various industries and people that are involved. I will be researching how net-radio is embracing the new and emerging technologies and development platforms of the Internet. Also how these technologies are affecting net-radio practice and behaviour. I will need to be researching various web 2.0 technologies such as RSS, ICAL, and XML to see how these are being incorporated into net-radio.

DOA Survival podcast

kryptou — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:54:34 +0000

MP3:	http://odeo.com/show/9324703/1665993/download/SurvivalMixOnDOA.mp3
Odeo Directory:	http://odeo.com/audio/9324703/view