Given the official launch I just had to become a Spinner, so for my first spin I present a wonderful black iPod:

To the Spinback team, awesome site and congrats on the launch. I look forward to independent wealth thanks to my ability to spin…

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Dabble is unique in that it allows you to store pointers to both video & audio wherever they are (google video, youtube, over 240 different sites) and organize them using tags. There are a number of great community oriented features like tracking media tagged by friends, most popular/most recently added media, etc… And the sharing of tags amongst the community. Dabble has a great blog at http://www.dabble.com/blog.

Its nice to see something really innovative and useful launch instead of more me-too efforts. Best way to think of Dabble is as both a community site & a "meta" tagging site for media (both audio and video). Keep a close eye on them, I bet you will be seeming some more interesting things rolling out in the future…

By the way, Happy Holidays and all that…

Structured blogging is really gaining traction and we made it to the top of tech.memeorandum.com, in case you missed it, here is a pic. Nice job everyone, now lets get the community building applications and defining the schemas…

How well do its recommendations work? Good question. I love underground and obscure music. There is something about it. I hate alot of the overproduced crap coming out of the music industry these days, but that obscure stuff is sometimes just amazing. The last couple of months I’ve been really obsessing over Bill Frisell’s Gone Like A Train. It really is an awesome album by an incredible jazz artist, and the perfect acid test to see if upto11 could really recommend some artists I know and don’t know. Now here is the amazing thing, pop that into the UpTo11.net search engine and lo and behold, up comes Dave Holland, another ass kicking jazz artist I’ve been enjoying. There is also a boatload of other interesting artists I plan on exploring. I love this, its sort of an exploration of musical space with concrete suggestions.

Now, you put in a jazz artist and out comes a jazz artist, ok not that great right? Well, it actually goes way beyong that. African blues artist Ali Farke Toure, another artist in heavy ipod rotation, is also there. Toure isn’t a jazz guy, he does Mali blues (which if you haven’t heard you should particularly if you like american blues, it is amazing). Somehow or other the UpTo11.net engine figured out they go together well. I could have told you that, but how did they do it?

Ok, next I figure I would get even more obscure, Old Crow Medicine Show (OCMS) has also made it into heavy rotation. Their song Wagon Wheel is amazing, I had a chance to see Norah Jones cover it at Irving Plaza (that was amazing). Now, consider yourself warned, OCMS is bluegrass. Yes hillbilly music, and just plain fun! I’ve been going through a bluegrass phase and enjoying a whole bunch of artists. It is kind of hard to figure out where to go next, but upto11 has already pointed me in some interesting and suprising directions. Spend some time with it, you will enjoy it. It also has this killer feature where it links ot wikipedia entries for the artists. I love the wikipedia and have blogged about it before. This is so freaking cool, I applaud them for doing that stuff.

I’ll be exploring the engine and the site over the next few weeks and tell you how the recommendations have panned out. I can’t wait to see what new musical realms it takes me too. Another absolutely brilliant effort by some really good friends!

Fascinating analysis indeed. Bloggers welcome to the mainstream…

Check it out at Wallop!

Why WordPress? I say why not. Its full featured, has a robust open-source community, and is done in php which is an interesting little language. So for now, here we are. Hope you enjoy it!

Now I have to test it with my offline blogging software….

I still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test

This is appropriate for tonight’s thoughts. Yes, the time has come, I am pretty sure I am going to move off of moveable type and move to something else. Ideas are certainly welcome. Right now I am lusting after WordPress. Comments welcomed…

Now I can’t wait for the microsoft specific RSS format.

Those krazy kats Ben & Mena have created an astounding piece of software. The really nice thing about moveable type is how full featured it is, with pings, trackbacks, etc… It makes for a true distributed publishing system that supports community involvement. For so long it appeared that the independant software developer was dead and these two have really put together something special.

Particularly nice is that these two have gotten decent funding and are starting out on a new endeavour called Typepad. I really wish them well. It appears to be a hosted blogging service much like blogger, the granddaddy of blogging and still a great service!

Back to moveable type. This thing is my favorite piece of software right now. Its extensibility is really nice. Check out MTAmazon. Its basically a plugin that cross-references your Amazon Affiliate account. It does some extremely interesting things.

For a full directory I suggest mt-plugins to find lots of plugins that do cool things…

Did ya see the people is Basra celebrating their liberation? I guess the french forgot what it felt like when we did it for them.

Another place to be watching is