Tag: Website
Behind the scenes at the British Music Experience
There are condom machines in the toilets of the British Music Experience at the O2 in Greenwich. I’ve no idea why – perhaps they think their visitors will be overwhelmed with emotion after seeing Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Thin White Duke’ outfit, or Dave Hill’s “Superyob” guitar. But in actual fact, it’s gadget fanatics that are likely to be the ones excited, because the BME is one of the most gadget-filled museums in the UK.
Almost everything in the museum is interactive. Your ticket comes equipped with an RFID tag that you wave in front of exhibits that interest you. These are logged in a central database, and after your visit you can go to the BME website and view all the exhibits that you looked at online.
There’s also the option to play along on real instruments with songs you know, or record a video of yourself dancing to one of several famous historical dances. That content will be stored and can also be viewed on the website later on, so you can share your embarrassment with people across the world. You get three free iTunes downloads too, to further investigate music that you don’t know very well.
Although it’s a great and well-connected experience, and anyone remotely interested in popular music since 1945 will find something interesting, there’s an ever so slight sense of a lack of use of the technology to its full effect. The tagging system is great, but it’d be nice to be able to explore extra content from home, rather than just reviewing the content you saw.
It’d also be great if you could do more with your recordings, getting the content out of the website. For copyright reasons, it’s impossible to do anything but stream the recording you make in the ‘Gibson Studio’ section. The British Music experience is technologically ahead of any other museum in London, but it’s still got unrealised potential.
Doodle helps you make choices with a large group of people online
Need to make a decision in a hurry online, with a group of people? Doodle’s got your back. It bills itself as a scheduling and choice-making site, and it pretty much does that – and nothing else – which is a breath of fresh air compared to most sites.
The question-asker just puts in the details, and up pops a link which he or she can then send to anyone they want to get input from. You can choose whether your poll is private or whether anyone can see anyone else’s answers – which will reassure the privacy-conscious.
Doodle’s free, and you can try it out right now. Registration is optional, but it’s quick and simple. It’s ad-supported and the company is based in Zurich, Switzerland. Go try it.
Fizy – super-quick streaming of songs and music videos
Are you a big fan of Spotify, but you’d like it to be more… illegal? Fizy is for you. It’s a super-quick website that’ll let you search for songs and music videos. I’m not kidding about super-quick, we’re talking ‘faster than searching your MP3 folder’ quick, on par with the aforementioned Spotify.
That’s not the only similarity. It’s got a very clean interface with minimal features and you can easily share tracks with other people. It claims to have more than 75 billion MP3s in its index, and you can expand or remove any videos involved.
Very impressive, and very useful for ‘do you know that song?’ moments. Not exactly a media player, though, as there’s no playlist functionality. I quite like that, though. That’s what I’ve got Spotify for.
Fizy (via @mychemtoilet)
Image courtesy of Lifehacker.
Last.fm bans third party mobile streaming applications
Last.fm has had rather a bad day for PR, making two very big, very bad announcements for its consumers. First of all, the company announced in a forum post they’re removing access to their API for third party mobile applications. That means that users of Mobbler on S60, Pocket Scrobbler on Windows Mobile, and FlipSide on BlackBerry devices will soon find themselves without a way of listening on the go.
The ‘official’ applications for the iPhone and Android will remain in action, which seems a little odd. If this is a licensing problem, surely the same rules are in place for whatever platform the content is delivered on? Relatedly, the service will also be stopping non-subscribers from accessing the radio APIs, simply because Last.fm wants more money.
Secondly, the company also announced in a blog post that it will begin charging for its previously free service outside of three countries – the UK, the USA and Germany. Customers anywhere else will be charged a fairly slim €3 per month for the service.
The company admits that the reason for this change is because it’s having trouble selling ads outside of these markets. The UK, USA and Germany all have relatively mature ad markets, where funding the service through advertising alone is possible. Outside of these countries, though, the company is having trouble.
What will remain free for all users is the scrobbling aspect of the site – where it charts your music taste and allows you to compare taste with friends and other users, as well as the social network that sits on top of everything. Although I’ve never pushed very hard to fill out my friends list on Last.fm, it’s grown incrementally over the years and now it’s not too bad.
I’m deeply disappointed that I’ll be losing access to Mobbler, even if it was a little rickety and didn’t work properly on the bus. Let’s hope that services like Slacker make their way over this side of the Atlantic sooner rather than later.
Zavvi lives on, online
Zavvi – the remains of the Virgin Megastore brand – eventually closed a few weeks back, selling the majority of its remaining bricks-and-mortar stores to HMV and Head Group.
The name, however, has been bought by the Hut Group, which sees them taking ownership of Zavvi.co.uk domain. That domain has re-launched today, offering a much broader range of products.
Although the original site concentrated mainly on music, games and DVDs, the new version will be more like Amazon – selling electrical and computing goods, books, sports and leisure stuff, perfumes and lingerie as well as aforementioned music/games/DVDs trio.
The site is live right now, and have very similar prices to the old site – i.e. slightly higher than competitors Amazon and Play.com. Still, it’s worth a look. Especially if you’re into buying lingerie online.
Guardian finally launches mobile website
I read newspapers on the bus in the morning. Not on paper – that’s expensive, wasteful and a bit of a hassle – but on my humble Nokia N95. I start with mobile Techmeme, then hit up Google News for the big stories, then over to the New York Times, because their mobile site is one of the best there is.
If I was forced to pick up a paper copy of the newspaper, it’d probably be the Guardian. Their website’s second only to the BBC for me, when it comes to online, too. That’s why it’d be nice to get the paper’s editorial perspective on my phone. And now I can!
Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement, actually. I could if I was on Three. Guardian News & Media has launched an initial version of its mobile site on the Planet 3 portal. Following a period of exclusivity with 3, and then another period of exclusivity with Vodafone, the general public will finally get access later this year.
It won’t be a moment too soon. Although phones are starting to get better at displaying the full internet, it doesn’t take much to slim down your page load times and shrink the photos, and many people won’t have full-internet capable phones for a few years.
What’s your experiences with mainstream media on mobile devices? Share them in the comments.
Seety: gazumping Google Street View for London
Google’s been taking its sweet time over the release of Street View for the UK, and as happens when you take too long over something, another company’s gone and done it instead. Well, not the whole of the UK, just central London, but that’s good enough for me.
Visiting Seety.co.uk, you get a Google Map of central London, and you just click to open up a Street-View esque image of the area, which you can then navigate around with arrows. All faces are blurred, and some of the smaller roads haven’t quite been indexed, but the majority of central London is present and correct.
It stretches most of the way up Holloway Road to the north, and not very far south – just down to Elephant and Castle. Out east it stretches approximately to Bow and Limehouse, and west, you don’t make it much further than Shepherd’s Bush. It needs a bit of extension, then, but what’s present is very impressive, especially given the higgledy-piggledy layout of London’s streets compared to American cities.
It’s unfortunate, though, that as soon as Google brings out its own Street View product, which can’t be far off, then this will become mostly obsolete. Still, in the meantime, enjoy looking around London, and if you find anything interesting, send us the screenshot!
Facebook changes terms of service, outcry ensues
A couple of weeks ago, Facebook changed its terms of service so that users won’t be able to delete their data if they leave the site. The blogosphere immediately erupted with criticism and it prompted a blog post from Mark Zuckerberg himself on who owns the data.
Facebook had been criticized for allowing a situation where someone could take a photo of you, upload it to the site, and then neither of you would be able to stop Facebook from using it for whatever purposes they like. You essentially waive all rights to the data.
Zuckerberg’s response to concerns is basically ‘chill out – we’re not going to take the piss here’. He doesn’t apologize, or even offer to soften the language – just asks users to trust the company. But how can users trust a company slowly eroding their rights?
Sure, odds are that Facebook isn’t going to suddenly abuse millions of people’s personal info, but if that’s the case, then why not retain the original language? Facebook has a history of communicating changes badly, and this is just another in a long line of screwups that include the profile redesign and the “Beacon” fiasco.
Niche of the week: ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com
This week’s bizarre corner of the web is the This is why you’re fat web site.
Subtitled “where dreams become heart attacks” it showcases “deliciously gross food” in all its saturated, multicoloured glory.
Savour if you will the “deep fried peanut butter-covered brownie wrapped in cookie dough”, “the garbage plate”, “The Romellete”, “The Meat Ship”, “hot beef sundae”, “the bacon explosion” and “baconnaise – everything should taste like bacon”.
FarAwayFish.com: using the web to communicate with loved ones once you've gone
Though the Internet is near-ubiquitous and social networking is skyrocketing in popularity, there’ll inevitably come a point when every one of us can no longer update our status, post a tweet, upload a Flickr photo or write something pithy on our blog.
How would the friends and relatives you usually only see online know if you dropped off the end of the world? Sometimes, your friends and family will pay tribute to you online, but you can’t always rely on technophobe relatives to do that.
One solution, according to FarAwayFish.com, is to set up a special online profile that only gets unlocked and sent out once you die. Messages, photos, videos and audio can be recorded and stored for up to ten years after your death so that friends and relatives can log in and remember the happy times…
