My friend and former colleague, David Porter, just announced 8tracks.  It’s the startup he’s been working on for the past 2 years, and for which I’m an advisor. 

8tracks is an easy way to share and discover new music by creating and listening to mixes.  You can upload your own tracks to create your mix or choose from a library of tracks that the 8tracks community has uploaded.  It’s drag-and-drop easy.  Once you’ve created your mix, you can publish it as a little flash widget anywhere you like.  That’s all there is to it.  Here’s a mix I just created that contains some of the music on heavy rotation in my ipod this summer:

Sign up for the beta using “rags” as an invite code and let me know what you think.  Congrats to David and the rest of the team – it’s great to the result of their hard work finally see the light of day.   

I bought a Chumby a number of months ago.  According to their site, Chumby is:

“…a compact device that connects via a wireless internet connection
and gives people a fun, hassle-free way to enjoy what they want most
out of the Internet, always on and simply at a glance.

Chumby Industries also runs the Chumby® Network, a rapidly expanding
open pipeline of user created and commercial widget applications for
chumby owners to enjoy and share with each other. Chumby Industries
works with leading media partners, including CBS, MTV Networks,
MySpace, The Weather Channel, AOL and Scripps Networks and other top
consumer brands to provide unique content for the Chumby Network.

The Chumby Network constantly broadcasts to chumby devices…offering the latest news, weather and entertainment as well as the
ability to share photos, widgets, e-cards and more with family and
friends.”

It’s a great idea in concept:  Chumby’s homepage is it’d be great to have a ‘mini digital billboard’ device that showed my pictures, the weather, the news and was an alarm clock.  Chumby is pretty good, but there are some aspects that have prevented me from more fully using it:

• For instance, the music directory is confusing.  They have a few different listening options  from their own listings to Shoutcast to podcasts, which makes things confusing. 
• Additionally, I’d like to have the alarm clock wake me to the radio, but I still haven’t figured out how to do this. 
• Since it doesn’t run on a battery, I am leery of using it as my main alarm clock
• There’s no local storage so I’d have to either upload all of my photos to Facebook or put them on  a USB drive and attach it to the device.

I like how they have an open system to allow developers to write widgets for it but I think the interface and software aren’t quite there yet.  If I were to put it in another room in the flat other than my bedrom, I’d probably use other features more like the video widgets for youtube and cbs clips.   Right now Chumby is the swiss army knife of gadgets – it’s internet radio appliance, alarm clock, digital picture frame (and more) but it doesn’t do any of them particularly well.  But they’re not far off.

Well if this isn’t link-bait…I just got a note from Blogged.com saying that:

Our editors recently reviewed your blog
and have given it an 8.3 score out of (10) in the Technology/Technology News
category of Blogged.com...We evaluated your blog based on
the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site
Design, and Writing Style.

8.3 = Great in their book, so there you have it: this blog is officially Great.  I checked out the Technology/Technology News category and you have blogs like I, Cringely, Gizmodo & GigaOm rated 10 (superb).  Going down the list, others that got 8.3 were blogs from the EFF and TimesOnline…hmm.  It’s flattering to be in such company but not sure I deserve it.

At any rate, since I’m writing about this and linking to it, just goes to show you that flattery will get you everywhere!

On heavy rotation on my iPod are:

MGMT, Oracular Spectacular:  Based in Brooklyn, they’re best characterized as psychedelic pop, and have a great new sound.  My favorite tracks are, Time To Pretend, Electric Feel and Kids – you’ve probably heard it one of the tracks on the radio and got the tune stuck in your head.  Check out the video for Time To Pretend to get a better sense for the band and their sound.

Santogold, Santogold: What is it about going to Wesleyan and being based in Brooklyn?  Like MGMT, Santi White, aka Santogold, went to Wesleyan and is based in Brooklyn.  She used to be an A&R rep at Epic Records  and released her self-titled album a few months back.  Although she plays it down, there’s no denying some element of M.I.A. in her music but there’s also elements of dub, psychedelic rock, synth pop…come to think of it she and MGMT should tour together!  Anyway, the album is a gem.  Listen to the first 3 tracks on her MySpace page and see what you think.

Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend: I’ve been listening to this one and off since last last fall.  Think indie rock with African influence (Paul Simon-style).  I was bummed to have to miss their London gig last last November.  They were the indie rock blog darlings for a while but I remember some naysayers saying that it wouldn’t last.  The album is holding up well for me after some heavy listening.

I’m looking forward to checking out at least 2 of the 3 in concert soon.

The news broke late Friday that Paidcontent had been bought by Guardian News & Media.  All Things D reported it at north of $30 Million.  Whatever the number, it is a great and well-deserved outcome for Rafat and the rest of his team.  Paidcontent is one of the must-read publications for the digital media industry and has been so for many years.  I remember meeting Rafat several years ago when it was a 2 or 3 person operation (their anachronistic name also gives away when it was founded during the lean post-Bubble years).  I also think it’s a great pick-up for the Guardian to expand their US presence and their coverage of the media space.

Congrats to all.

I was in a conversation the other day about sources of restaurant recommendations and the notion of collaborative filtering came up.  Namely, why don’t more review sites do collaborative filtering.  So I did a quick, unscientific poll by visiting the Zagat, Time Out and Yelp pages of Shake Shack.  These span the entire editorial spectrum with completely user-generated Yelp on the one-end to user-generated,editor-curated Zagat to editor-selected Time Out. Some observations:

• Yelp has the most information density with user comments playing a central role, user ratings, nearest transit options and  lots of metadata.  It also provides me with what other restaurants people have viewed that have also viewed Shake Shack.  Nice.
• The Zagat page is clean and fits their design principles.  There are tabs for photos and menu, which is a feature the others should have.  Zagat surfaces community features nicely with nearly as many comments (359) as Yelp’s (382).  However, there are no collaborative filtering recommendations.  Given Zagat’s database, this should be a no-brainer for them. 
• Time Out’s page is heavy on advertising and but not as much metadata.  They have the ability for users to leave comments but, surprisingly, there are no comments for Shake Shack.  That fits with their brand in that it is built on what their editors think are the best things in town, but it’s still surprising that their site lacks community.   Ironically, this page is the 3rd result for “shake shack” on Google whereas Yelp’s is top of page 2 and Zagat isn’t even in the top 4 pages of search results. 

So which would I use?  I’d visit all 3 if I had time.  If I didn’t, I’d probably give Yelp the nod, followed by Zagat.  But I wish all 3 would do a better job recommending places I may not know about or have been to yet, that would let me favorite places I’ve been to, and create wishlists of places I’d like to try.

While I’ve really enjoyed living in London these past 9 months, I’ve also come to appreciate America more.  There are a lot of aspects of America that I wish would improve and I have certainly complained about them, and will continue to do so.  But there is a lot to love:

• The level-headed practicality that Americans have and their optimism.  Americans aren’t weighted down by history as I’ve seen in European countries.  (Of course that will change if and when America is no longer the world’s only superpower. )
• The openness to other peoples – something I have personally benefited from and something that worries me when I see xenophobia rear its ugly head during troubled times
• The customer service.  Couldn’t resist that one and I’m sure my fellow ex-pats would agree!
• The tolerance for failure and encouragement of risk taking: as my uncle says, “If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere!”
• The Bill of Rights – it’s a beautiful thing.

I could go on but I’ll leave it there as I’m off to a BBQ (and yes I’m digging celebrating America’s independence in the land that she freed herself from a couple of centuries ago!).  Happy 4th everyone.