New Pandora? Tips for improving Soundz.fm

Soundz.fm - logo and screen

Soundz.fm - logo and screen

Soundz.fm is a new Slovak startup that provides you with (quoting their slogan) “Listening to the radio, new school style.”

They provide list of radios you can add to your account and listen to via Flash player. If you don’t like the song playing on radio X, you can quickly switch to a different radio station to listen to different track. Multiple radio stations are good concept, but you still have to switch to a different station manually via Soundz.fm web application.

I have been thinking about how to improve Soundz.fm to attract more listeners, how to personalize it and how to automate track switching. I am going to describe my ideas on how to make Soundz.fm better. I haven’t spoken to Soundz.fm developers, maybe they had thought about ideas described below before I had. Since I really loved and had been a big fan of Pandora, a free internet radio, I have been thinking on how to implant Pandora spirit and features into Soundz.fm (Pandora is now available only to US-located visitors).

Build a long list of radio stations

Adding radio stations manually is pain in the ass and with increasing number of users this task becomes unmanageable. One option is to make a spider that uses Google search and Yahoo Site Explorer to find out radio stations and online streaming playlists. Allow community to help and add new radio stations instantly (e.g. allow user to add radio station’s URL and enable it to him only until administrator verifies it and allows it for everybody). Get as many as you can, this will be important (see point no. 3).

Let users build a list of their favourite tracks

Currently, users can favourite a song playing on one of the selected radio stations. Allow them to build a list of their favourite artists, albums and tracks even before they listen to one of the radios. Ask them for their username at Last.fm (or Pandora) and import their listening history automatically. Optionally, allow users to enter their favourite artists and songs manually.

Change the concept: one personalized radio station

Instead of offering a list of multiple radios, create a one personalized radio station that plays only the music the user loves. Based on their preferences (known history of favourite tracks from Last.fm/Pandora or entered manually) loop over long list of radio stations and find what tracks are currently being played over the world. More stations you have in your database, easier to find a matching track – the track popular with the user.

Automate radio/track switching

Think about algorithm that changes songs playing based on the user preferences automatically in the background. Since by this point you will have a huge database of radio stations all over the world, scan through the all songs currently played and find one user likes. If you have more than one favourite song, that’s even better. When the currently played song ends, switch to a different radio with a favorite song playing, try to find the song that have had just started to play, so you don’t fade in a song that finishes soon. Create auto fade-out/fade-in mix, so the music will play uninterrupted even at the time when songs are being switched.

Since the Pandora have had shutdown for the rest of us (not the US, though), Soundz.fm can take it position as the global free online music radio. There are thousands of regular and online radio stations all over the world playing music 24/7/365. If Soundz.fm will have huge enough database of radios, it can easily play only music that users love to them. Every minute there must be some song on the air that user likes – based on their listening history, popular artists, albums and songs and similar artists, albums and songs (Last.fm has a great API that could help in this regard).

I hope the Soundz.fm developers will find some inspiration in my ideas above. I am sharing them with everyone, so you can add your two cents.

PS: If you belong to Soundz.fm and want to hear more opinions and ideas (re monetization as well), feel free to contact me.

:: March 8, 2010 23:21 :: category Internet, Musings :: [*] :: No Comments ::

How Amazon, AmieStreet and YouTube Support Internet Piracy

I live in Slovakia, a small country neighboring with Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. Slovakia has been a full member of European Union since 2004 and entered Eurozone last year (i.e. we have had Euro as a currency here since January 2009). Nevertheless, I as a customer feel like living in a warzone with no rules, no solid currency, no nuffin’ for some internet companies.

I am keen on music, so I buy lots of music on the internet, either as CDs or sometimes as downloadable MP3s. I download music a lot from torrents, but when I really like something (listen to it more than twice or thrice), I buy it.

AmieStreet - not available in your region

AmieStreet - not available in your region

Lately, I have been buying some music from AmieStreet, an independent music shop that splits income fairly with the artists. I like browsing around in their catalogue trying to digg up some unknown music gold. You can listen to previews there for free and then just buy what you like. One day I encountered strange message shown in place of the Buy button when I wanted to buy some music: “N/A in your region”. Well, if they don’t want to sell the music to me and I don’t have other option to buy it, I will just download it as bad-bad pirate. AmieStreet supports music piracy by treating me as a second-class customer.

Amazon - not available in your country

Amazon - not available in your country

Amazon is another case of rotten meat. They will eagerly sell you CDs and books, but they say no to selling me MP3s. Altghough, MP3s are cheaper – you can buy just one song or whole album (still cheaper than a CD) and moreover, no shipping or duty is added to the final cost. But Amazon doesn’t treat me as a customer, they say:

We are sorry… We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Well you know what, Amazon? Fuck you with your US only policy! I am going to steal that music and download it anyway as a bad-bad pirate. Amazon supports music piracy by treating some people as second-class customers.

YouTube - not available in your region

YouTube - not available in your region

And now for the beloved or hated (choose your position) Google giant and their video website YouTube. Often, I find myself looking for the particular music video, but to my dismay, Google/YouTube says:

This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions.

Usually, you can find that video on the other websites, so you just go and look somewhere else. YouTube voluntary sends many visitors away to other websites by treating you as a second-class visitor. Alternatively, you can always find any music video downloadable as a torrent, anyway. YouTube supports music and movies piracy by not allowing you to stream the content online.

This could be an end of this post. It could have been. But the ugliest thing here is not Amazon, AmieStreet, YouTube or other stupid websites with similarly stupid anti-piracy policy, the ugliest fact is that some companies will treat you as a second-class users on the internet. They will deny you from voluntary spending money on things you want and instead force you to walk around shady corners looking for those things, so they can point on you screaming “Pirates!” later.

The attempts to close some parts of the internet for some parts of the world are just too damn sick. And next time you hear those crazy anti-piracy corporations screaming “all customers steal, give us our money!”, next time you read about other 13-years old kid being locked up in the prison for downloading few songs they like, next time some weirdos from Business Software Alliance talk about how 40+% of people are pirates (because they “forgot” about population using open source), ask them, why are you denied music you want to buy, why you have to pay 100 EUR (136 USD) for the software that costs 100 USD in the US (but is not sold for that price to Europeans), ask them why their crazy oligopoly policies take you as a hostage. Ask them that and refuse to talk to them since they are just plain old racketeers. Download, steal and share the torrents, until they finally get rational and behave as decent human beings do.

:: February 22, 2010 21:46 :: category Internet, Rants :: [*] :: 4 Comments ::

Retro Folk Dolls Chocolate Packaging

Figaro dolls with chocolate packaging

Figaro dolls with chocolate packaging

Figaro, a Slovak chocolate and sweets company owned by Kraft Foods, launched their retro style chocolate packaging featuring folk dolls well-known to the older generation. The company has also started a competition on their website (due to the entirely Flash website, it is impossible to link to the competition directly).

Dolls are named Jana, Dana and Lena and consumers can play online Sims-like game featuring all three dolls.

Figaro retro theme chocolates

Figaro retro theme chocolates

:: February 17, 2010 19:28 :: category Internet :: [*] :: 1 Comment ::

Death Of Interstitial Pages

Ten years back, interstitial pages used to be almost customary. Many websites had their logos, special announcements or even advertisements displayed at the interstitial page right after you visited the respective domain. Interstitials were set to automatically redirect to the requested page after some time (generally 10  seconds) via META refresh tag.

Interstitial page example

Interstitial page example

The custom to display a (not requested) page in-between was quite intrusive and pages with advertisements often featured Flash banner over the whole page. Some website owners later started to put a “skip intro” link below the image/advertisement, but often this link was below the fold and required further action by user (scrolling and clicking) to get to the desired page.

Not only went the interstititals against usability principles, they often meant certain exit (as we call it today) or loss of a user. Many users could have felt lost or even unwelcome seeing some unfamiliar page displayed after typing the well-known URL or clicking on the link.

I haven’t seen an interstitial page for a long time now thanks to the wise website owners. Unfortunately, there are still some questionable ways to display unwanted content to the user – lightbox and its clones have been misused for this purpose over the last few years. We probably won’t see an end of this technique soon, but those interested in their visitors already know that forcing user to view unsolicited content (even worse: animated Flash banner) means bad user experience and very likely higher bounce rate (percentage of users that immediately leave).

:: February 13, 2010 14:30 :: category Internet, Musings :: [*] :: No Comments ::

How Well Does Google Cope With The Content Language Change

Have you ever wondered how can a change of the language of your blog posts affect overall traffic on your blog? How do search engines cope with the fact the content they encounter is suddenly in the completely different language? Is Google quick in indexing new content and how early does it find 301 permanent redirects and index the well-known old content on the new URLs? I have tried to find all these things out as a part of my small real-life experiment.

Day 0 – Settting things up

I have uploaded my new English WordPress blog and set everything up on Wednesday evening, January 20, 2010. At the same time my old Slovak blog has been moved to www.ambience.sk/old/. I assured myself everything was up and running and 301 permanent redirects working. I have not provided a sitemap (XML sitemap protocol) to the Google, instead believing in its natural (algorithmic) abilities.

Day 2 – Google notices the change

Nothing interesting happened the first day, but on the second day after using site:.ambience.sk in Google, first new English blog post showed up in the results. Homepage of Ambience.sk was also indexed with the new English title and description. No changes were reflected by Google regarding the old Slovak content, same old URLs were showing.

A week after – Google slowly indexes new URLs

Every new day Google was slowly finding changes and indexing 301 redirects as the new URLs. English blog posts were also slowly showing up in the fresh part of the search engine results at the top.

Day 13 – lots of changes, few URLs still to go

Google results shown - old content still at the old URL

Slovak content still at the former URL

Google continues to pick up the new URLs, but it is doing so very slowly (the Slovak blog had only about 800 posts and pages). I now see most of the former Slovak content showing up at the new URLs with the old/ prefix. However, it looks that Google either forgot about or still plans on indexing few Slovak posts that has moved to the new URLs.

Another slovak blog post still at the former URL

Another slovak blog post still at the former URL

Another interesting fact is that original Slovak blog now (www.ambience.sk/old/) now shows up at first position compared to the new English blog at www.ambience.sk. Although, I have not redirected homepage www.ambience.sk, all the former Slovak blog content has the internal link to www.ambience.sk/old/, which gives more importance to this page than to the domain root. Few days ago I have put another link from every /old/ page pointing to the domain root / new English blog, so let’s see if the order Google uses changes.Old blog vs. new blog in Google results

Old blog more important than the new blog to Google

Conclusion

Google is rather slow indexing the changes, specially for the pages that did not used to change a lot (e.g. About blog). I could have used XML sitemap to speed up the new URLs indexing rate, but this experiment confirms Google is able to find and use 301 redirects without any further help.

I will keep you updated on the changes. Expect another post on how the language change impacted the traffic. You will also get a peek into some screenshots from Google Analytics.

:: February 2, 2010 21:34 :: category Internet :: [*] :: No Comments ::

8 Reasons Why Linux Makes You More Productive (Window User-friendly Article)

I have been using Linux as my primary system since late 2005. I had had other more or less random encounters with various flavours of Linux before that, but those had been times when you couldn’t get your sound/graphics/whatever working and good internet sources were scarce.

Ubuntu desktop 3D cube

Ubuntu desktop 3D cube

I have tried lots of different Linux distributions and always been leaning to the most stable and usable ones. Slackware could look as a strange choice at first, but actually it is one of the best ones for really learning Linux (and command line). During my Slackware era I used to try different cutting edge distros such as PCLinuxOS, SUSE or (K)Ubuntu. PCLinuxOS looked good and even recognized all hardware (those were times, when even Windows XP had problems with some peripherals and required additional drivers), but since it was built upon Mandrake, it was also quite lazy. At last I installed Kubuntu and have been running on it up-to-date.

I am more productive using Linux than Windows and this is my experience:

Got a hanging program? Kill it instantly and run it again. (got Windows? Well, wait for half a minute and maybe it will allow you to terminate it, finally) Some heavy program slowing down whole system? Find it via top (or through GUI) and deprioritize it quickly. (no such an option on Windows as far as I know) Need to do WHOIS lookup on a domain, traceroute, ping or some <joke>kiddie-scripting</joke> stuff? No need to search for internet services. Everything is right in there. Are you an avid listener with lots of music? One word: Amarok. Better than user-unfriendly iTunes (ever tried to have your music on multiple devices?), better than good old simple WinAmp. Software sources – you can have Linux installed and fully equipped with everything you need (office suite, email, instant messaging, system tools etc.) before first actual run. Updates are also easy – and continuous (small packages, fast download – compare that to Windows gigantic monolithic updates). Eye candy – not that important to me, but some people require it. You got wider options to change wallpapers, add widgets, change panels, have six virtual desktops on a 3D cube etc. Bug reporting and problem solving – no operating system is without bugs and Linux is no exception. You can sometimes encounter weird bugs on a pretty standard hardware configuration. Advantages are that there are multiple highly effective problem solving systems up and running. Google is your friend and in 95% of time you will find the solution. Bugs are very well documented, user forums are widespread. In comparison, Microsoft’s knowledge base is rarely of any help. Last, but not least: no viruses, spyware or other kinky stuff – no need to reinstall system from scratch, ever. I have witnessed friends pulling their hairs out due to Windows falling down under spyware, trojans and viruses. Be supportive to these less well-off.

There are also some things not that good, though:

GIMP – graphic editing program that has the worst windowing interface (thus also user experience) ever. Period. Fortunately, there are some lighter alternatives. Some internet-related applications missing or not usable. You would expect Linux to cover any and all internet protocols and services. Sometimes, this is not a case – I used to have problems finding good software for DC++ network three or four years back. User experience could rarely be an issue, too – although many things have been standardized for a while, you will find some weirdness still in there. Basic users are fine, though.
Ubuntu Logo: Linux For Human Beings

Ubuntu Logo

It appears to me that more powerusers are switching to Linux than ever before. Now it’s a good time to make a switch for people (family, friends) who ask you to set up their computers, too. They will be safer and no viruses mean no more panic calls. The choice is yours.

:: January 26, 2010 20:55 :: category Internet, Musings :: [*] :: 4 Comments ::

On Book Titles Orientation

Books - book spine titles orientation varies

The problem

Have you noticed? Sometimes when you buy a new book, the book title orientation on the spine is top-to-bottom. But then you also have lots of books, where title orientation is bottom-to-top. Now try to shelve those books in your library – it’s just confusing. To get it right you need to turn some books upside down, which means changing their front cover and back cover position.

I have always wondered, why are some book titles lettered from top to the bottom and some other way round. Now, this Wikipedia page on  Bookbinding makes it clear:

In the United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, titles are usually written top-to-bottom, and this practice is reflected in an industry standard; when the book is placed on a table with the front cover upwards, the title is correctly oriented left-to-right on the spine. In most of continental Europe, the general convention is to print titles bottom-to-top on the spine.

Basically, Wikipedia says that mixed shelving of books printed in the US and United Kingdom with the books printed in Slovakia, Germany or Czech Republic is just plain impossible – you can’t get book spine titles in the same position. After checking my library, it is clear that even continental publishers don’t get it right – some use the continental (bottom-to-top) approach, some use English one (top-to-bottom), so you can’t even get Czech and Slovak books to shelve properly.  Those are the troubles of man buying books both from Amazon and from the local Slovak bookshops. I will have to go with a spine shelving technique and compromise by placing some books sideways (and possibly use the foredge shelving technique). Although, I would have expected to have an international standard on spine title orientation by now.

What are your ways to cope with the mixed title orientation on the book spines?

:: January 23, 2010 11:33 :: category Musings :: [*] :: 5 Comments ::

People I follow on Twitter #follow2010

Andrej had tagged me last year with #follow2010 (the the list of people I am and will be following this year). Since Twitter logoI set up English blog only yesterday, I am catching up on the task to list and describe people I follow a bit.

Music

I am following my beloved musician George Evelyn (Nightmares on Wax) @nightmaresonwax as well as G-Stone Recordings @gstonevienna (home of Kruder and Dorfmeister and other artists) that are sometimes giving out free tickets to their appearances (in Flex, Vienna for example). I also follow Nathan Lively @NathanDoFrango of Ze Dos Frangos, band with mixed origins and members from Slovakia. I shouldn’t forget to mention SoMA FM – listener-supported, commercial-free internet radio located in San Francisco that you will definitely enjoy, if not listening to them already.

There are also electronic Foolk @foolkmusic and rapper Bene @bene965 (former Modre Hory) from Slovak musicians on my list.

Bratislava and Central Europe

For cultural events at A4 zero space I follow their profile at @A4nultypriestor (Slovak only) and for interesting stuff, news and tips there is @bratislavatips.

I also follow Czech journalist and inspiring essayist Peter Koubsky @petrkou (Czech only), English translator living in Slovakia Roger Heyes @rjsh and of course Andrej @asalko – who tagged me with #follow2010. I could also mention some Twitterers tweeting in Slovak, but that wouldn’t be much of help (although with Google Translate, there is a hope).

Internet and design

In no particular order: designer and blog author Dustin Curtis @dcurtis, 37 Signals company @37Signals, web standardista Jeffrey Zeldman @zeldman, Dan Cederholm – better known as @simplebits, semantic zealot (in a good meaning) Ian Davis @iand.

…and I tag #follow2010

these people: @rjsh and @NathanDoFrango. Hope to see your lists (could be on Twitter), guys!

:: January 21, 2010 20:24 :: category Internet, Musings :: [*] :: 1 Comment ::

Hello world! (now in English)

Hello world – I have been preparing and writing my Slovak blog at Ambience.sk since 2003.  In mid-2009 I slowly came to decision to either stop writing completely or (and this was a better idea) to start writing my blog in English.

Therefore, this is my first post in English. Slovak blog was moved and redirected to www.ambience.sk/old/, where it is stored for archiving purposes.

Topic of Slovak blog was related mostly to Bratislava, Slovakia where I live and then things about internet (web standards, SEO, Linux etc.) as well as other random musings.

Topics of my English blog posts will be much wider. I want to write less about politics, more about internet, my Linux experience (I have been active user since 2005 – at first Slackware, now Kubuntu), maybe also some SEO and usability posts (as this is what I enjoy doing in my work and sometime in my free time as well).

In addition to the blog posts here, you can follow me on Twitter (or as Dustin Curtis has it: “You should”).

Enjoy and hope to see you around.

:: January 20, 2010 10:58 :: category Musings :: [*] :: No Comments ::

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