It's been a while since I really wrote a blog. Today's topic is the music scene and how social networking/web 2.0 is affecting it's proliferation. So social networking is a term thrown around a lot, one of my favorite blogs for keeping up to date with the scene is Mashable. It's basically a site that keeps track of updates in the social networking world. If facebook adds a feature to allow you to send a flaming poo filled bag to your friends porch, you'll hear about it on Mashable. Let's talk about music. Music is one of those things that most people enjoy, but have no clue on how to get into it. MTV/Radio are the places most people go for their info. Friends are a great source since they know what you are into. I was recently told to check out an application called Songbird. Songbird is the brainchild of two former application developers from Nullsoft (Winamp) and Mozilla, the open source browser which kicked off Firefox. Songbird is a merging of minds in this arena. It blends the flexibility of a browser with the needs for multimedia. This application blends some of the internet 2.0 concepts and creates a one stop interface for media on the web. It uses the interface of Mozilla/Firefox to give the user the ability to browse the web in teh context of music. You have your browser pane, but you also have a media player bar and a play list. Let's say you browse to a blog with indie rock mp3's posted on it, Songbird will then scan those files and put them in a playlist. You can browse bookmarks and just listen and stream music from webpage. This application is in beta stages and still has some kinks. It also has basic iPod integration as well, so it will soon be able to replace iTunes. Since it is built off of the Mozilla/Firefox framework, skins are changeable as well as adding extensions. Within an hour of using it was already checking out new bands and finding out about them. Social Networking you say? Well aside from being able to listen to music and download it from any music blog on the web this application can work work Last.fm. Last.fm is a social networking site developed for the soul purpose of linking people through music. It takes your play list and lets you manipulate it on the site. This lets you link it to other bands. This requires you to run a last.fm application on your computer that knows what you listen to. This protocol or action is called Scrobbling. There's a plug-in for songbird which kinda/sorta works located here. This combination of social networking, media browsing and just listening allows us to listen to music, see if other listen, see what they like too. So my suggestion is to check out these application, give them a shot, you never know you might get into music again.

On a more personal note, things are going good, I get to work on GIS at work. It's weird, back in the day I wanted to work on this stuff. I wanted to get into it while at Cuesta and SFSU. I remember walking past the GIS labs and wondering if i should take the classes. Glad I didn't then, but now i wish i had. It should be a lot of fun and very rewarding.