There is this now playing plugin for winamp which lets you send current IDtag data via GET/POST. Nice.
It’s beta and there are still some issues but it works. I have build a little flashticker showing what’s now playing on my winmap. The time of the last update is shown too. It updates on page reload, there is room for improvement. The update checking and display could be moved to flash, so it doesn’t depend on reloading.
 
The possibilities of what you could do are endless. You could save and build an interface to your whole playlist of recent x days/weeks/months. Or display the cover with a link to amazon. Or..
 
What I like most about it, is the connection between the real life of the blog owner and the blog as hers/his web representation.

About 2 weeks ago I started using feedburner for my main feed. It took a while to decide because I prefer being independent as far as possible but feedburner offers some interesting services like stats (currently 1! subscriber [me]) I wanted to try.

The actual feed page looks like this by default. This is the feed for the b-sides category, just as an example. For my main feed I chose a different style.
The default style looks much nicer but I decided against it, because it looks to much like a regular web page.
Today a friend emailed asking where he could find the link to the feed, pointing me to the feedburner address.
 

Well, this is the feed, it just doesn’t look like it. I think a lot of people who are not geeks just got used to the pattern “if I read XML and there is a lot of crazy code on the page, this is a feed”.

So if the audience of a blog consists of rather regular internet users, using a styled feed can really be a disadvantage.
Even if they are right on it, they might not identify it as a feed and might eventually not subscribe.

I was going to post something about the R&B group Next, which I discoverd through pandora actually. This post would have included a mp3 with part of a song. Well, I thought, try and find out what do you have to do to present 2:00 minutes of that song completely legal on your blog.
 

Being resident of Germany I went to GEMA, the “society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights”. They have a repertoire search, I entered the song, refinded the search by entering one of the writers mentioned in the booklet as “name of interested party”.
The surprising result was a list of 10 full names and the publishing and sub-publishing companies.
I searched for the website of one of the german sub-publishers, which I found and got redirected to www.warnerchappell.com. I registered and filled out a license request for License Type “Multimedia” adding the comment “private, non-commercial blog, 2 Minutes, …”.
I am really curios what they are going to offer me.
 
Read on…

Puuuh, my whole work seems to circle around wordpress right now, which isn’t a bad thing.
Priority has a profile plugin for the MU version of wordpress. It features an interest search/match thingy, like in livejournal. Users my add as many terms as they like and are able to search for users with the same interests and a free search for any interest. This is done, still in the works is a user image function. A thumbnail of that image should show up everywhere the blog is referenced within the site, interest match results, recent posts on frontpage and so on.
 

Next in queue is an image gallery. I ported an image gallery I wrote last year to wordpress already but want to add some extra features. It’s very easy to use, just install the files, add a shorttag to a page and it is ready to go.
You can create different albums and you can choose if the big images should open inline, below the clickable thumbnails, or in a popup window. The feature I want to add is to seperate certain albums from the main gallery page to display them in post or pages. Every album has an id, just insert the id with a shorttag in your post and you could have a little gallery with 3 images that open in a popup window for example.
Those albums can be exluded from the main gallery.
 

Now that I have digital camera I realized I can’t upload videos with my own plugin! :)
The videos are in avi format which the videopop plugin doesn’t support right now. I can’t remember why, it certainly needs to get fixed.
There are a few bugs to fix, one of them is a “needed but forgotten code bug”, and I want to improve server requirement checking.
I hope this will help people to get a better idea why videopop isn’t running correctly on their server.
 
Read on…

Since beginning of this year I come across the term Web 2.0 here and there. But what is this ominous new version of the Internet? Tim O’Reilly tries to explain in his esssay What Is Web 2.0 .