Offmessage

For reasons close to my heart (sleevenotez and my old company) I’ve been watching the Radio 1 homepage for a while today. They have an SMS widget on the homepage, which shows the most commonly texted in words… When Tristan launched it back in October it was comments on the music. Now it’s MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. What does this mean? That everyone wants to be Lilly Allen or the Arctic Monkeys, that’s what. Gah!

I’ve been wondering for a while about tracking comments on blogs…. There’s a group of us who have been in electronic contact for years and years. It started out as a mailing list, but over the past few years moved through IRC to the current network of blogs.

What I’ve been feeling the lack of with this move to blogging rather than mailing lists is the conversation. If I comment on a blog I have to remember to watch that post to see the replies and possibly comment again. The minute I post more than one or two comments to one or two blogs I find it impossible to track the conversations that I’m involved in. This has meant, so far, that I’ve been pretty taciturn when it comes to commenting on other people’s blogs.

I was muttering about this today prior to a planning session with a customer (so much so that my mutterings made in to a User Story) and thought that a) I can’t be the only person with this problem, b) it’s a very web2.0 problem, and c) someone must have built something to solve it already.

And indeed they have… I’m currently trialing both coComment and co.mments.com. Apologies in advance for the possible outpourings to come…. It’s all in the name of research, obviously.

Also, my apologies to Mark for not getting it (at all) when he suggested that we built almost exactly this type of system back last summer. To be fair, we built Sleevenotez instead, so it wasn’t an /awful/ mistake, but still…

Woo hoo! Our favourite (if a little neglected right now) baby Sleevenotez has made it in at number 12 in Techscape’s list of The top 25 UK web 2.0 start ups (as also reported in The Register). Thanks guys. That’s fair made our week!

I’ve just been over to my Last.fm page to discover that, even though we’ve both played well over 5,000 tracks, my good friend Stef and I are musical neighbours. In fact, given that the other two above him are actually my two Sleevenotez test accounts that are actually playing /my/ record collection, he is the single person most similar to me on the entire of last.fm.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is weird. Apparently there aren’t many people out there who share our love for a heady combination of Manu Chao, Eels and The Flaming Lips.

Paul LaMere got in touch with us when he saw Sleevenotez because of the similarities with his SnappRadio service. Since meeting him I’ve started tracking his blog and it’s a wealth of music related information. Today’s hot pick is RateYourMusic - made all the better by the comments pointing out how to use their RSS feeds as a rather hacky API. I can feel another Sleevenotez integration coming on…