There are now 3 ways to view the front page.
Overview (Default): We show you posts from all blogs, but each blog is limited to having one post per day shown. This means if a blog posts twice in a day, the second post will not be visible. That said, a single post may contain several tracks and that will be displayed normally.
All Blogs view: All posts from all blogs we track.
Top Blogs view: All posts from the top 100 blogs as determined by their Technorati and Delicious popularity.
Anthony Volodkin
Taylor McKnight
Zoya Feldman
Scott Kidder
Arkadiy Kukarkin
I was not happy with the “top 100 blogs” default, so this is better. However I see the need to boil down the sheer mass of incoming songs to a managable number. 60 pages per day is rather a lot. I wonder if some data-crunching genius could come up with several “music lover archetypes” by clustering up the hypem users from analysing their favourite songs. I’m thinking something like “the eclectic classics lover”, “the dance remixes lover”, or “the commercial pop lover” and many more. In a next step one could associate certain blogs with certain archetypes, I think. So, hypemachine could let you choose an archetype, and then present the blogs that are liked by that archetype with good probability. I’m pretty sure the principles of this are already invented (e.g. in consumer tpyes in market analysis). Come on, I know you could do this!
btw the player has a bug: the progress bar size is in some weird way dependent on the font size of the browser. My browser happened to have a setting that shrank the progress bar to a mere square dot, so I thought it was gone altogether. Also the “Switch to fullscreen” context menu item does not budge at all (using Firefox 3.0.1 on iMac).
Anyway thanks for everything so far.
March 10, 2009 @ 6:11 pm
No way man, that way people will just discover music in their comfort zones. We combat this.
March 10, 2009 @ 6:13 pm
“Overview” & “Popular Blogs” hahah. I love it.
Much improved though. Were some blogs posting ridiculous amounts before or something?
Anthony it’s safe to say you will be changing the blogging game with this move. I’d expect to see more “variety” post happening just so blogs can squeeze in their tracks. Not the worst thing that could happen I guess but it will make things much less organic. The way companies handle growth and success is a very interesting things my friends.
Ladies & Gentlemen welcome to the new era in blogging - mixtape posting, haha.
March 10, 2009 @ 6:29 pm
Hey Anthony + co.
Great way to satisfy everyone, I gotta say. Hmm, but I want to bring up that when I click on the “POPULAR BLOGS” tab, I it sends me to this funny page. http://hypem.com/#/top/1/ It seems to think “top” is a hypem user.
Just wanted to bring that up to your attention.
March 10, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Is there a danger of this limiting the “conversation”? If a track only appears once, it may be from a blog who has less of interest to say about it than another blog might (in the former’s haste to get the track posted, for example, or if said blog publishes in French). I also like to read differing opinions on a particular mp3.
March 10, 2009 @ 7:26 pm
This seems like a good compromise Anthony! Thanks for taking into account the comments from the blogging community.
March 10, 2009 @ 8:49 pm
Anthony,
Who’s buying you drinks at SXSW?
wishing I was gonna be there, I’d buy ya about 137 rounds!,
xoxo,
Tart
March 10, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
Amongst these experiments it would be nice if you could keep an RSS feed going off the “all blogs” tab.
March 11, 2009 @ 6:52 am
I appreciate more options now than just the Top 100 list. It’s a happy medium.
But why even have the Top 100 at all now as a view option? It just seems like an excuse to give the most trafficked sites even more traffic and comes off as elitist. I like the Top 100 as a list viewable on the site. The blogs on it deserve the honor, but it should be a list not a set of features tied into the site architecture.
It seems like its more fair to the community as a whole to simply have the “overview” and “all blogs view” as the two options.
March 11, 2009 @ 10:29 am
The ‘overview’ idea seems like a reasonable compromise, and I really like that it is now the default (rather than ‘top 100′).
More than anything, though, I really really appreciate how responsive Hype Machine was to the concerns of music bloggers - thanks!
March 11, 2009 @ 10:45 am
I gotta say, I think only showing one post per blog per day is kind of dumb.
What about the blog that has three or four people writing for it, the person who posts a track at 9am is into Yanni and The Village People and the next three are into music the rest of us like? We only get the Yanni and Village People tracks? Obviously this is an extreme and unlikely example, but many blogs have multiple people writing for them, who often have very different tastes. It’s been great in the past to be exposed to all these different tastes through HypeM. Gotta say, I think that’s a mistake.
Also, if you think the site’s been too cluttered, I’m not sure cutting down on the number of posts shown will help; the bloggers will just post 15 tracks at the end of each of their posts, rather than five in three different posts.
March 11, 2009 @ 10:48 am
Luis: Fixed, thanks
V: Your assumptions about the top 100 blogs are incorrect. They are high quality, have been around for a long time and post a diverse set of music. Part of why we chose the stats we did is that they aren’t easily swayed by variations of what people post and are mostly affected by long term effort on behalf of the bloggers. I wonder if you’d say the same thing if you were in the top 100?
samR: If people post 15 tracks, the view will be condensed into 3 viewable tracks and the rest won’t be shown unless you click a special link.
March 11, 2009 @ 11:14 am
Anthony, thanks for the prompt response. That was unclear to me.
I think I mispoke…the one post per blog per day thing is not “dumb” and it was probably necessary for your end and for the readers; that said, I guess I’ll subscribe to some of my favorite blogs in Google Reader to make sure I don’t miss anything.
This new rule will probably change the way mp3 bloggers post on their sites. Anyways, keep up the good work!
March 11, 2009 @ 11:41 am
Anthony:
Thanks for the mail.
I never said Top 100 blogs were not diverse or of high quality! They are most certainly are BOTH. They are the veteran blogs that many of us newcomers only hope we will be in 3-5 years time.
My only point was exactly what you’ve said “mostly affected by long term effort on behalf of the bloggers”. Being, its a system that doesn’t allow space for new sites as it takes quite a long time to build up the amount of technorati and delicious data to be ranked a top 100 site.
I think the marking of a good community is the ability for veterans to mix in with newcomers in an environment where everyone draws from one another.
I think its a little presumptuous to speculate that I would feel different if I was on the list.
I actually APPLAUD the creation of the list. In a medium where everything is so temporal, with new blogs popping up and disappearing daily, a list based on longevity lends a seriousness to a medium that is too often looked down on as a lesser form of journalism. I love the list. I think the list should be displayed proudly as badges on the featured bloggers sites.
I only take issue that it becomes a way to sort content in a hierarchal manner and ingrained in the features of the site.
Honor where honor is due. But a level playing field has always been a major reason’s for hype machine’s success and continued support from the community.
March 11, 2009 @ 11:42 am
Yeah, but c’mon, you applaud but yet don’t see value in offering that as one of the ways for people to explore the activity. If you look through that top 100 page, it’s a quality set of things people are writing about
March 11, 2009 @ 12:05 pm
It’s all just a discussion of opinion in the end.
It would be an impossible to task to create a community based web tool like hypem with every user and visitor’s preferences met. The new sorting options reach a happy medium for everyone. And I find it refreshing that you all really do listen to and enagage with the community you’ve created.
March 11, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
We like feedback and take it seriously
March 11, 2009 @ 12:52 pm
One is not enough! One post per day per blog. Now that I see in action I think hype machine is losing out on being cutting edge. Some blogging addicts get sent/find great music throughout the day and hype is the best resource to share it outside of their own blog. How about two per day?
March 11, 2009 @ 1:50 pm
No dude, to maintain maximum revenue efficiency, we have to make it 1 per day. Otherwise, the selling out just won’t be worth it!
March 11, 2009 @ 1:56 pm
Well I wasn’t happy with th default on the popular blogs. Me being new having my blog on hypem and all. This is fair. Thanks guys.
March 11, 2009 @ 3:14 pm
Anthony,
Well I hope you added in the time and money it took to calculate your maxium revenue efficiency model, otherwise you’re way off, dude. I don’t wanna be part of some two-bit operation here! Give me my money’s worth, damnit! Or give me a full refund.
March 11, 2009 @ 6:15 pm
Hello,
I have a usability question regarding the redesign. I’m an end user. Not a blog owner.
How I used the site before:
I never visited the homepage (unless I want to search for a particular song). Instead I subscribed to the RSS for all the songs posted, then I’d scroll through them in my RSS reader, and look at the songs I was interested in. I’m currently subscribed to http://hypem.com/feed/time/today/1/feed.xml.
What brought me to the site today was that the number of posts making it to my RSS reader has way slowed down. I came to figure out why that might be. I think I know now that it is because of your experiment with the front page of the site.
My question then, is there another RSS feed I should subscribe to that will give the functionality of the old feed which lists every song from every blog you track?
Thanks for the site. Please respond via email also.
March 11, 2009 @ 9:01 pm
I love the new bar at the bottom… surfing the site while keeping the same song playing is amazing… plus the repeat button… mmwonderful
March 12, 2009 @ 1:08 am
I have my Hypem account (http://hypem.com/#/siart) set up to tweet my loved songs to my Twitter.
I’ve since noticed that since the switch to the new Hypem happened the tweets are not happening. I’ve logged in and out and in and out, loved, then unloved, then loved again - none of it seems to have any impact. Anyone else having any Twitter issues?
March 12, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
Thanks Anthony for responding so quickly to the concerns of all us small bloggers. I personnaly think the compromise is great, and the change will be positive in that it will force lesser but more quality posts.
Now a bug(?) question : sometimes, I’ve had older posts show up again like if I’ve posted them now. Right today, I see on my blog page that I’ve supposedly posted on Kap Bambino 20hours ago (which was in fact in december, the post appeared for the second time). Now I just wrote and posted a new post about The Dirtbombs, and I guess the new one will not appear because of the one post a day limit? What is causing this behavior and is it possible to fix it?
Also from when to when exactly is the “day” period? midnight to midnight New York time?
Thanks a lot,
G.
March 12, 2009 @ 7:16 pm
Edit : Finally, after I checked through all the pages, the old post appeared in http://hypem.com/#/list/6826 but not on the main page, while the new one did appear correctly. So everything is ok but I’m still wondering why posts reappear at random that way (and before they used to appear on the main page too, which was more exposure but was misrepresenting the blog and not fair to others, and was cluttering the main pages).
March 12, 2009 @ 8:26 pm
I love your site, you guys did and DO an awesome job!!!
I’m on your site every single day when I’m home sewing!
2 thumbs up for the new bar player at the bottom, great evolution!
Keep it on!!
March 12, 2009 @ 9:49 pm
I think the top blogs should be decided by the number of followers (or number of played songs) on hype machine instead of some external rating. Who is using del.icio.us today anyway?
And thanks for making it possible to listen while browsing the site! This site gets better and better
March 13, 2009 @ 5:22 am
When I search for a song and click play, the music bar blacks out, then the page I was on changes back to the “latest” page, i.e. the hypem home page. Does anyone else get this?
Thanks
March 13, 2009 @ 4:39 pm
I love this compromise. Way to go and thanks for listening to the community!
My only beef is that HypeM+Last.fm is broken - the site doesn’t properly scrobble plays/faves (happened right when you brought in the new player bar at the bottom, which is otherwise super-duper).
Thanks!
March 14, 2009 @ 5:51 pm
Always used HypeMachine with SONGBIRD. Unfortunately you dropped support for it. Very bad news for lots of people if i look at the comments at there customer support. Please consider bringing it back again. Thx.
March 16, 2009 @ 3:21 am
This seems to work against everything that was good about Hype Machine. And I’m seeing the results in my blog’s stats, too. Not good *at all.*
If music blogs are supposed to work as an alternative to commercial radio, why are you suddenly emulating Clear Channel?
Hoping you’ll stop the madness ASAP.
March 16, 2009 @ 10:40 pm
I like the front page much better.
I will once again wear my hypem shirt with pride.
xo yolanda
ps. thanks for being there when I need new music. :]]]
March 19, 2009 @ 10:22 am
I’d be fine with that - if I could change the default back to “View all”. I want to pick my favourites myself, no matter if i have to go through 60 pages.
Maybe that great blog I don’t know yet posts that very special song as its second post today, and they are the only ones to post it: I’ll never gonna find it.
So let registered users change the default in their profile settings and i’ll be happy.
btw: Great site after all…
March 23, 2009 @ 5:56 am
LOVE US !
March 26, 2009 @ 9:27 am
donch you can probably bookmark the url if you like, it will always stay /all/
March 28, 2009 @ 10:23 pm
Vast improvement. It’s less about feeding the fattest blogs. That’s definitely a good thing.
Mike
UK
April 6, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
Hey guys - we applied to be part of your blog network months ago but were declined because the blog was only 2 months old. What are the rules surrounding re-application? Do we get another chance or is that it?
Anyway, liking these new features - although it’s hard to know which setting is the best!
HazMat
June 26, 2009 @ 7:51 pm