A site I have been helping develop over the last couple of months has just launched. It’s a Nokia sponsored site to raise awareness for “Earth Hour“.  Earth Hour is a special hour set aside each year for people to save energy and try and give the planet a breather.  If everyone in the world did it then the planet would get an hour “off” in each timezone adding up to a day!

Mobile phone chargers are one of the many household things that when plugged in they burn electricity even when they are not being used.  Electronic goods with “standby” options are also a big waste of energy.  So Nokia, who are releasing their new low power phone chargers, wanted to raise Earth Hour’s profile by creating a website.

So I present to you “Planet Unplug“!  A simple, fun little site where you can join others in pledging to do something energy efficient during Earth Hour by adding a little plug socket character to our wall!

Please spread the word anyway you can by emailing, blogging or “tweeting” about it.  We have created a few little widgets that can be added to blogs (http://www.planetunplug.com/main/blogtools) to help get the word out too!  Here’s what the first two looks like:

We will be adding a few more features over the next week or two so come back and check them out!

Now go ahead and have an explore!  And don’t forget to add your pledge!

Planet Unplug: http://www.planetunplug.com

I’ve been a user of Beatport for years now and have watched them grow to the biggest online music store dedicated to electronic music.

There is definitely a love-hate relationship with them for many people. We love Beatport for having such a wide choice of music. We love them for getting early exclusives. But we also hate them for being a bit “too big for their boots” and, most importantly, not really listening to their users.

We waited a looong time for this new version of Beatport. Far longer than it should have taken and even when they launched in January this year they were missing a few things fans thought would be shoe-ins.

Something I have been calling for since Beatport announced it was making version 4.0 over a year ago is a public API. Why oh why haven’t Beatport sorted this out yet?

Websites that offer open APIs get all the usual benefits of open source development: a huge, creative workforce for very little money! Simply look at the enormous success of Facebook’s API, which continues to grow and go in new directions, and also Twitter with it’s simple but very useful API.  These APIs have helped these sites grow enormously by effectively outsourcing work to anyone from hobbyist programmers and professional developers.

I would love to have access to a Beatport API for many reasons.  One of the best reasons for me would be so I can access my account’s favourite artists and labels so I can display them here on my blog.  Or have a list of the latest tracks released by my favourite artists in a simple list so I can see if it’s worth going to Beatport today.

Probably the main reason I’d like an API is because I don’t think Beatport are serving my needs very well, which is fair enough if I am in a small minority, but then why not let fans like me mold and shape the Beatport service to suit my needs?  It can still be Beatport branded and it will still have me going through their payment gateway so it will always benefit them.  Also, creative people will be able to add huge value to the Beatport service.  A Beatport API should be a no-brainer!

Does anyone agree with me about this?  What other things would be cool to create using a Beatport API?  Add you comments below!

Best idea evar:

The Shit Box

http://www.thebrowncorporation.com/

Impressive!

Having only just blogged about Beatport’s new website being thoroughly overdue I came across an email from Beatport deep in a pile of unread stuff which announces that the new site is being launched on January 21st 2009! Hurrah!

Screengrab of Beatport's new interface

The teaser site has a “senses” theme (hearing, touching, tasting, seeing and smelling) and seems to hint that the new Beatport site will be the dogs knackers.  They say they’ve been listening to their customers and are promising lots of cool new features.  I hope so, although I’m not sure quite how I am going to “smell” my music…

As I write only the hearing part of the 5 “senses” is active.  It explains that the preview player has finally been overhauled to make it easier to browse music.  The video “tutorial” is a bit disappointing and sometimes mind-numbingly dull (”click the up arrow to go up…. and click the down arrow to go down…” – no shit Sherlock).

It looks like they haven’t gone for the “needledrop” style player that DJDownload has which is a crying shame because that is one of the best things about DJDownload and to be able to have a full track preview is incredibly useful.  However, Beatport in their infinite wisdom have stuck with a 2 minute sample.  Their “enhanced music player” (*cough*) does its usual scrubbing (jump the playhead about) and has been given a volume control (much needed) and a playlist (much needed).  Which basically means it’s now inline with how DJDownload’s preview player worked 2 years ago.  Hmmm… Beatport seem to have made the most important part of the site not so much “enhanced” but incredibly average!

So a rather disappointing look at the preview player to start with.  Hopefully the other senses will prove more impressive.

So checkout http://www.thenewbeatport.com for a teaser “trailer” and a sneak preview of the upcoming features of the new site.

Beatport's new player

Beatport's new playlist queue

I was shown a nice charting/graphing tool done in flash.  It’s called “XML/SWF Charts” and is free to use with some limitations.  A single license is still cheap at only $49.

Examples of what you can do with XML/SWF Charts

Pretty cool if you like that sort of thing!

Check it out: http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/index.php

Lunchtimes for me often revolve around finding a nice food market near where I work, grabbing a burrito or tub of thai food and going back to my desk to catch up on my RSS feeds via Google Reader.

One of the fun sites I subscribe to is http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com and today I got a pleasant surprise when a photo of mine appeared in a post!

My photo is the second one down (”no reading please”).  I took it one morning on the way to work in June and submitted it to the site straight away.  I guess it’s taken them this long to find some other similar photos to make it worthy of a post!

Beatport’s newsletter today informs me that at long last they have reduced their, frankly extortionate, prices for tracks for UK customers.  I don’t know if this reflected across all their international markets but I for one am happy to see them do it.

Read the rest of this entry »