Pluggd is a media sharing site. They have the prerequisite features for searching or sharing podcasts or video. However, they go beyond that. One feature is their HearHere technology, which lets you search through audio or video podcasts using a keyword or phrase. If you don’t think that’s great, consider what has to happen behind the scenes: conversion of audio to approximate text. It has to account for accents and emphasis. Unfortunately, because English is not a phonetic language for the most part, tools like HearHere aren’t yet always accurate.

Now, in addition to these tools, they’ve added a feature that lets you share what you are listening to with Twitter friends and followers. Your twittering says what podcast you’re listening to, and provides a URL (converted to TinyURL by Twitter). (The SplashCast you see above has two parts: an image of the Twitter plugin in action and a screencast of hearhere in action, though without audio.)

This Twitter/pluggd functionality fis of course similar to Last.fm and iLike in the sense that you can share your interests, but allows you to throw in podcasts into the mix.

What I’d really like to see is some sort of standardized XML format for “What I’m listening to” lists that include audio files, podcasts and vodcasts, splashcasts, or whatever. If books were added as well (what I’m reading), we’d have a standardized way to share our interests with other people, and could actually combine lists from different sources, to be displayed at a single place (MySpace, blog).

What’d be even more interesting is to see some of the online dating sites incorporate “what I’m listening to” and “what I’m reading” types of lists in member profiles. I’ve reviewed a few dating sites (such as Verbdate) that had Skype VoIP triggers so that members can talk to each other. Though I have yet to come across any that extend their interface to include any of the multitudes of list APIs.

Originally posted on April 5, 2007 @ 12:47 pm

You know all those crappy WordPress themes that litter the web, the ones that just are in the way of the good ones you want to find in the WordPress Theme Viewer? Well, there is a good reason for the lack of more kickass WordPress themes: They take time to develop. Doing good design is not only hard work, it is most often expensive.

Blogging Pro’s David Peralty e-mailed me about the release of their second WordPress theme, titled InSense. While we don’t usually cover theme releases here at 901am, this one is a bit more interesting, and it’s not just because David sent me two e-mails about it.

You see, the theme comes with a sponsor link at the bottom, and the folks over at Blogging Pro, who are doing the actual release, aren’t shy about it. Lots of themes cram in affiliate links and whatnot in their themes, but few of them admit that they are trying to leech on unknowing users.

[Read more…]

Originally posted on April 5, 2007 @ 3:40 pm

Programmable Web lists some fun new web services mashups: FlickrSpy, JukeboxTube, and Ficlets.

FlickrSpy dynamically displays new photos posted to Flickr as they come in, sort of like a vertical slide show. It’s a fascinating view for those of us visually stimulated. It’d be really nice to have something like this for the “life in pictures” Digg and Twitter mashups that I’ve been fiddling with. (It appears, though, that I may have to write my own code to achieve this.)

Jukeboxtube lets you build a YouTube playlist, though I don’t believe you can embed anything to your own site.

Ficlets is a way to for fiction writers to collaborate online. If you’re not sure what to write about, click on the “inspiration” link, which displays a grid of photos from Flickr. They also display Dictionary.com’s word of the day and random “story starters” and “story enders” text.

Another web service previously covered by Programmable Web is Slideroll, which is a slideshow viewer that you can configure with your own images. Though I’m of the opinion that SplashCast’s presentation viewer beats anything I’ve seen to date. Still, what seems to be missing out there is the ability to take some sort of RSS-based custom image feed and to pipe it into a slideshow viewer. Or say, a combination of a slideshow mixed in with the idea of Ficlets. If such a progrrammatic slideshow service is out there, I haven’t come across it. Anyone?

Originally posted on April 4, 2007 @ 10:30 pm

[Updated Apr 6th] Video may have killed the radio star, but will SplashCast kill the video star? Or at least broadcast TV? SplashCast – who have Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch as Director of Content – offer a brilliant way to collect a number of visual elements and present them as a slideshow embedded into a blog or MySpace page, or even into widgetized portals such as Pageflakes.

The difference is that each “slide” can be a document or an image you upload, or the video or images from YouTube or Flickr feeds. (You can’t have all simultaneously.) You can also apply background music to your SplashCast, or record voiceovers and webcam video.

While this is great in itself, it’d be nice if I could take an RSS feed and pipe it in. For example, here’s a mashup I’m trying to find a “slideshow” app for. Last month, I talked about a mashup feeding Twitter’s public timeline feed into Yahoo Pipes‘ Content Analysis module, and the results of that through Flickr to produce a sort of “life in pictures” for Twitterers. Now, what I’d like to do is have a mashup tool to take that Yahoo Pipes result and get a SplashCast-like result. That way, you get an automatic slideshow of the “Twitter through Flickr” feed.

The other problem is that you can’t eliminate items from the Flickr or YouTube RSS feed. For example, since Sharon mentioned the Alanis cover of Fergie’s “My Humps”, I created an Alanis SplashCast. [Start the player below, and click on the “Channel Guide” graphic.] But it’s full of multiple submissions of the same video. It’s also full of completely irrelevant video items – at least as far as I’m concerned. So it’d be nice if SplashCast let us remove selective feed items. Not to mention splice feeds. [Note: If you use the “search” feature to grab Flickr or YouTube content, you can pick and choose which items to add. But you cannot change the playlist order unless you do multiple searches on the same terms and pick one item each time, in the desired sequence.]

Still, what this means is that if you’re sick of the music videos on TV, you can create your own YouTube playlist, embed the player on your blog, and not take up a lot of screen real estate. And SplashCast hosts it for you. Brilliant. Bye bye MTV? Well, not yet – not until we have full control of the input RSS feeds in SplashCast, but it could be the next step towards a melding of vlogging and the million channels of TV we’ve been promised for about two decades.

Originally posted on April 3, 2007 @ 11:34 am