sydlawrence-blog

[sydlawrence-blog]

In browser MIDI

So I created a simple node based MIDI bridge. There is no need for this.

WebMIDI is in the HTML5 specification, but no browsers yet support it.

For the time being there is a browser plugin and a polyfill

Browser plugin

Polyfill

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This is totally badass. Massive congrats to Rob Hampson & Adam Howard

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"The meme this week will be..."

So the week before the last, the meme going around was The Harlem Shake.

This week it looks like it is going to be "ft. Goat". A few weeks ago there was an amazing video being sent around the interwebs.

Goats Yelling Like Humans - Super Cut Compilation

Then a clever person named Goosik who "remixed" a video for a song by Taylor Swift. It is epic!

Taylor Swift - I Knew You Were A Goat When You Walked In

Off this has spawned quite a few further remixes from other people.

Chris Brown ft Goatsy

Miley Cyrus (Ft. Goat) - Party In The Usa - HILARIOUS NEW EPIC

Justin Bieber Baby (Goat Edition)

David Guetta - Titanium ft. (Goat)

Taio Cruz ft. The Goat - Dynamite

Basically, the internet works in weeks. Memes end at the weekend, and then often start again on the sunday. Most of these videos have been uploaded today. Except for the long tail that continues the following week, but all the hipster interwebers get sick and tired of memes quickly.

Goat songs are nothing new. Nor goat parodies. Some guys did a parody of a Lonely Island song, "I'm on a Goat".

Internet memes are interesting things, they just happen, it's a the internet hive mind at work.

Obviously everything I say about memes is utter bullshit, it's more just people mucking around and having fun, and entertaining others. It doesnt happen at set times, nor is controlled by anyone, thanks to freedom of speech.

What the fuck is a meme anyway? I've got no idea.

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http://globalheroes.theendofpolio.com

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Good evening and welcome to a special bulletin from the corporate communications team working with business development. We have done some careful analysis on the Harlem Shake Roulette project to ascertain the ROIs and KPIs and FBIs.

This is how it all began.

2nd...

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I just added a new project to my playground: The Most Awesome Site Ever - Your New Homepage

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I just added a new project to my playground: Bat Blocker Plugin

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I just added a new project to my playground: Who is reading 50 shades of grey?

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I just added a new project to my playground: Tomahklet

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So what exactly is Tomahawk?

It just plays.

Tomahawk is a music player. Like we need another winamp, iTunes or spotify. See that's the thing. Tomahawk, isn't another music player.

Tomahawk is THE music player. Let me explain why. So where is the music that you listen to? For some of us it is on your local hard drive, for others it's on a subscription based music service, and for quite a few of us it's also other online services such as youtube, or soundcloud, quite a few of us probably use all of the above.

That's where tomahawk comes in. It plays pretty much *everything*, using what we call resolvers. Local files check, Soundcloud check, Youtube check, Official.fm check, Spotify check, last.fm check, the list goes on. On Toma.hk we have the 3 main subscription services covered, Rdio, Spotify and Deezer, currently in tomahawk we only have spotify, but the other 2 are coming soon.

So, that's playing music covered, but what about sharing music with your friends? "But I don't want my friends to know what songs I am listening to!", that's not the kind of sharing I am talking about.

I'm talking about those moments when a song reminds you of a friend, a moment, or simply wanting to tell your friends about an exciting new song. "Oh, but I use spotify and they use rdio". Worry not! Just share the toma.hk link. You can play it on whichever service you damn please. But personal situation and preference is only one thing. There's also that annoying geoblocking issue.

I'm in the UK. I see someone talking about the new show to watch at hulu... Guess what, yeah you got it. Well it's exactly the same with music. I'm watching a music video on youtube, I share that with my mate out in Germany. He gets geoblocked. He now ignores most youtube links... true fact.

Ok, so sure, a link for one song, so what, I have playlists... I have playlists that have all the songs I listened to when I was a teenager. I want you to hear that. I want to share this playlist with you. Well I can.

BOOM!

So, that's the sharing sorted. What about the discovering. So you really want to grab all the songs played in last week's BBC Essential Mix. Or you use a service like Share My Playlists or read some music blogs and reviews. Well you can use our new bookmarklet. This literally grabs all songs mentioned on a page, and creates a player for them. Fancy keeping hold of this songs for a later date? Well save them to your tomahawk.

Or maybe you are one of these music reviewers or bloggers. You can embed a toma.hk player for single tracks, albums and *even* playlists. In such a simple process. Let your readers decide what service they use to listen to their music. And please remember that the internet is an international thing. People from all round the world can read your review. Don't tell them to fuck off by telling them they can't listen to the song, because they don't live in the right country.

And... it's open source. Does it not have a ready made resolver for your obscure music service? Build yourself a resolver. Resolvers are really quite simple to make, check out some of the other resolvers to see quite how easy.

And finally, "but what about mobile". That is an interesting question. I have spoken to a lot of people over here. And they say "but i use spotify on my phone". Yeah sure, right now, me too... But what you can do, is bi-directional playlist syncing! "What was that you just said?" So basically, add a track to a playlist in tomahawk... It adds it to the spotify playlist. And vice-versa.

Holy shit, that sounds awesome... Doesn't it.

Go download Tomahawk now, and check out Toma.hk.

Any feedback, please let us know.

I honestly believe this could quite easily be the most exciting time for music on the internet. We in no way advocate piracy, and are in no way encouraging it. We are simply combining all the legitimate online music services in to one, and re enabling the social aspect of listening and sharing music.

We are a small team, and none of us are full time, this is a hobby project. Want to get involved? Come join us in #tomahawk on freenode.

[sydlawrence-blog]

I just added a new project to my playground: Professor Green - Instagram Tour pics

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I would like to introduce you to... the Tomahawk embeddable button

So, if you have anything to do with tech / music. You will be aware that earlier today, spotify launched their new play button.

Their play button allows any website owner to embed a simple play button for any spotify song onto their site.

This is great news... for spotify users. Unfortunately spotify is yet to be worldwide and due to various licensing issues, not everyone everywhere has access to the same tracks on spotify.

You may be aware of Tomahawk. Tomahawk is an awesome music player that basically plays tracks from anywhere that it can find them. Whether the track is on spotify, local, sound cloud, official.fm, or various others.

Today, we bring you the Tomahawk embeddable play button. Any website owner can embed a play button onto their site for any song. They don't even need to worry where the song is hosted, as long as it is *somewhere*. Tomahawk does the rest of the work for you.

To add a tomahawk play button to your site. Simply visit Toma.hk find the song you want, and copy and paste the embed code... Simples.

Let me know what you think :)

[sydlawrence-blog]

The state of data from broadcasters

Last weekend I was invited out to the beautiful french riviera by the guys at Reed MIDEM for their new conference, MIP Cube "Explore The Future Of TV", for a hack day organised by the Rewired State. I was a very lucky sod. I spent 36 hours on a luxury yacht hacking about trying to make something interesting.

After discussing project ideas with my girlfriend, I went to Cannes with the aim to build a simple reminder service. Something that sent me a message 5 minutes before a tv show I wanted to watch aired.

It would be a simple service, simply viewing listings data, picking a show, and then the system would send a message. Nothing complex. I was amazed it hadn't been done before.

I have to admit I am not au fait with available tv / film data. But after googling a few times, and speaking to a few more experienced tv / film data hackers. It seemed that the best 'official' listings service to use would be Atlas by Metabroadcast. In theory it seemed it would do what we wanted. Atlas obtains data straight from the BBC. It's basically as close to an 'official' source as we could find.

After a few hours we had the system all working, and it was time to test with 'real' data.

As you can see from the screenshot above. The data was 'patchy' to say the least. Show titles such as "Episode 7" doesn't really help..

After doing some more digging into data, it seems that some broadcasters charge for their listings. I find this extremely odd in current times. Sure, I can understand when businesses are literally running from this data, TV Guide, RadioTimes etc. But, my point is that if you get your listings data out to more people. More people know what shows you are showing, have more chance to see a show they want to watch. Which in turn provides the broadcasters with more viewers of live TV. Especially with many broadcasters being concerned about the coming death of linear TV.

Sure, we could have screen scraped a bunch of sites to obtained the tv listings, but at this hack day I was more interested in creating something that lasted, which would require 'legitimate' data.

The challenge I set was simple. The hack was simple. What was the problem? The data, or quality of.

Now I see why there isn't a reminder service already... all I wanted to do was get the broadcasters more 'live' viewers, is that such an issue?

Most radio stations now have a simple data call to find out the current song being played... Yes the current song. TV? I can't even find what's going to be aired, let alone what is currently being aired.

Yeah sure, there are a few third party 'unofficial' data providers. Zeebox is soon to be releasing their API. But why is a third party needed?

With this all being said, I would like to massively thank Reed MIDEM & Rewired State for inviting me out, I had an epic time, and was great to meet / work with some amazing people.

"It was mega lols, now I need mad coin to buy a boat"

For more info about the hack day:

Rewired State

The Show & Tell Video

Guardian - TV hackers thrill MIPCube Conference, but call for more open data

The Next Web - Hack Day Shows The TV Industry is Way Behind the Music Industry

Wired UK - Hackers slam TV industry over lack of open data

Update:

@moustaki points out that the bbc do have hidden apis for listings. Which is a great start... Now hopefully the other broadcasters will start doing the dame.

[sydlawrence-blog]

I guess this is why people do Christmas cards

So, I spent a few moments the other day looking back at the last year. I have had an EPIC last year.

I started the year working at Marmalade on Toast where I was working on various cool projects for the likes of Budvar & Harrods. Working on exciting projects. 

In April, A friend came up with an idea for Instagram. He sent me a Direct Message on Twitter. "Dude, Instagram + cats. Epic win!". 24 hours later we had http://instac.at. On the first day alone there 10,000 more people joined my christmas card list. This I feel was the start of it all.

4 weeks later I left Marmalade to try the big world alone. I started working with some awesome clients, each of you were / are awesome. And have helped me to have an awesome time. I can't list you all here, but you know who you are.

I started working on my own projects with various new 'business' / project partners each of which I would like to thank.

All the journalists and bloggers who have written about projects i have been involved in. This has been the first year I have ever had something I have been heavily involved in mentioned in the media. Especially the ones of you who called me a "UK based web guru" or a "modern day superhero", even you commenters who called me a "fucking facist".

All the people who have invited me to talk at their events. All the people who have taken their time to listen to my rantings.

My family & my friends for putting up with me being useless and uncontactable.

Especially Sophie, my girlfriend, for putting up with me being the worst boyfriend ever and for not feeling ignored when i get my head down in code all the fucking time ;).

All the people who have basically interacted with my life in anyway. Including you, the person who is reading this for putting up with me wasting their last 5 minutes by reading this christmas card.

I have seriously had an epic year.

I hope all of you guys have an epic 2012. 2012 for me is looking like it will be awesome thanks to all of you!

And for a bit of shameless self promotion. The projects I would like you to currently check out or keep an eye put for are: (let me know what you think, would love feedback)

Kinect Virtual Disco Deathmatch Search Instagram ArtSpotter Bloo.ie We Make Awesome Sh Digital Bookings Ltd. WorriedNow

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"Find us in the app store" vs "Google it"

I was having a chat with a friend about app marketing, and the app store. The reason why they are starting off with a native iPhone app is due to the massive call to action presented with the "Available on the app store" image.

Search for "ArtSpotter"

This image provides the user with a MASSIVE call to action. "Oh right, that is where I can find it"

That got me thinking. Personally the process of finding a website online is far easier, especially if I know the domain name. So that got me thinking, for purely marketing of web apps do we need to start using something like this:

Visit artspotter.com

Now although the fact that it says artspotter.com is pretty easy to me perhaps users actually need to search for something.

Search for "ArtSpotter"

Obviously I would rather the Available online would work better but I have a worrying feeling that "Google it" might work better.

Maybe this is the reason why HTML5 has a logo?

Mozilla are soon to be releasing their own app store. For the general mainstream, the ones who type into google "facebook". These are the people we need to help get our warez into the hands of to go mainstream.

I think the web community needs a cause to get behind for the good of the web. Who's with me?