Machine Shop: Hype Machine Team Blog

A good article from Aidin Vaziri in Monday’s SF Chronicle about various trends in digital music.

R.I.P. CDs – Begone bright discs and pesky cases! Begone!

The article highlights good MP3 blogs, online radio, Napster and satellite radio. Give it a read.

I’ve been reading Questionable Content for a while now, but recently I noticed a great bunch of references to MP3 blogs in a few strips. If you haven’t heard about this webcomic, here is a WikiPedia entry about Questionable Content.

Here are the strips:
One (#449), Two (#465), Three (#466), and Four (#468)

Jeph Jacques even created a Blogger account for the blog mentioned in the strips: Yelling About Music!

Many of you have been telling your friends about the Hype Machine and writing about the site on blogs and even in some publications. I really could not ask for more. It warms the heart to know that others find my small project so exciting.

Thank you.

With the new visitors also comes an increase in traffic, which in turn ends up pushing my hosting account over the monthly bandwidth limit. This gets expensive.

The ads are here to make sure you can keep enjoying the Hype Machine. I am sure you like the site much better without them, but at this point, they are a necessary evil. I’d prefer to avoid having them altogether myself.

If you have any ideas or questions, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line – I would love to hear from you.

UPDATE 8/1/07: We are experimenting more with ad placement, so feedback is always welcome.

Thanks to Alf Eaton it is now possible to search the Hype Machine right from your browser.

If you have Firefox, you can install this search plugin and Hype Machine will appear as one of the options in the search box.

Click below and hit “Yes” to confirm installation, to set this up:

Firefox/Mycroft search plugin for The Hype Machine.

Here is Alf’s original post.

Mersenne from Undomondo kindly wrote to me about the volume of the tracks that appear in the main Hype Machine RSS feed.

He pointed out a few valid problems:
• Some bloggers post an overwhelming amount of tracks in each post
• Others post a large amount of tracks by the same artist

Both of the above issues end up flooding the front page as well as the RSS feed.

If you’ve been having a similar problem, you may want to try the Hype Machine feed of post excerpts. Each message in the feed contains a short excerpt as well as a nice listing of the songs mentioned in the post.

To get a better idea of what this looks like, you can look at the posts section of the Hype Machine.