All posts by Ben

New features in the RIAA Radar

New features in the RIAA Radar: Top 10 charts by genre! The new charts (from genres such as alternative rock, country, rap, blues, and everything in between) not only show you the top 10 best-selling albums, but also matches it up with the top 10 best-selling albums that were not released by the RIAA. The charts, along with the new “find similar RIAA-free albums” feature, should leave you with plenty of alternatives and no more excuses. Stop supporting the RIAA!

Sign up early

New business plan for life: Sign up for every community web site and game that comes out, as soon as possible, betting on the idea that some of them will become huge and I can sell my low user numbers. (I’m 2141 on Friendster, and 454 on MetaFilter. If you want to give me a starting push on my new career, feel free to send me a bid!)

New RIAA Radar features

The post-sliced-bread era has arrived!

There have been two new features added to the RIAA Radar. The Amazon Top 100 gives you the RIAA results of Amazon’s top 100 albums by sales rank (useful for realizing just how much the RIAA controls, and finding the diamonds in the rough,) and then there’s the Indie 100: the Billboard chart for smart people. Find good and popular independent artists without having to wade through garbage!

Looking for data

Anyone know where someone could find a free/public XML feed of stock quotes (or even just the major indexes?) E-mail me is you know of one. I’m working on a top (TOP!) secret project, and screen-scraping just isn’t doin’ it for me.

On a similar tangent, if you happen to own a chain of used record stores, and would like to give me the data on your inventory (weekly or quarterly, you pick) for a top secret project, that would be great. Thanks in advance.

Creating a web-only, real-time news broadcast

Seeing this image of Dan Gillmor using iSight and iChat together gave me an idea: Creating a web-only, real-time news broadcast, using something like iSight and iChat to create the generic “anchor desk shot”, complete with infographics! (For example: 1, 2, and 3) The idea is that a second person (the picture-in-picture) would be the “production” computer, which holds the video and photos, and runs the show, switching the focus from computer to computer. When the focus is on the anchor, the production computer shows an infographic, and then when the anchor is done talking, the focus switches to the production computer which then runs a video or displays a photo. This idea may be really raw, and possibly not workable with iSight and iChat specifically, but I think it could be interesting, in a amateur/guerilla/Dogma 95 news kind of way…

It may be possible with iSight and iChat, but it would be sloppy, since that’s not what those programs were made for. My initial instinct would be to point the camera at the production computer’s screen, which would mean you would have to have it done very tightly and exact, or have a program that would display the imagery fullscreen with no loss. This is also not really something I have experience in, and I also don’t own any of these technologies so that I could try out or test such a setup.

Ranks albums by how many people still own them

Data I would love to have: albums sold to used music stores. Even if it was just a few charter stores as sample data. What I want to have is a sort of “staying power” index; a list that ranks albums by how many people still own them, not by how many were originally sold. I am never amazed at how many new albums are in the used bins, because they all contain 1 popular song and 11 other crocks of shit. I want to see what the albums are no one would ever part with. You could use the actual sales data to make a ratio vs. how many were sold back. Anyone run a used record store?

RIAA Radar launches

Special super-hot news/self-post!

RIAA Radar: The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America. You add the bookmarklet to your favorites list, go to any album on Amazon, click the bookmark and it will tell you if the album was released by a member of the RIAA!

Combine Map of the Market with an actual aerial map of a city

LazyWeb, I invoke thee! (Since I do not have the ability to trackback, this is really just me yelling out to noone in particular…) Someone should somehow combine the Map of the Market with an actual aerial map of a city (or “market”, if you will). Use company addresses to plot their location on a map, and show the graphic representation of their stock price (ala the green/red color blocks in SmartMoney’s version) over the plot of their building/campus on the map.

I’m not sure how truly useful of an application this might be, but I think it would be interesting and I could see myself sucked into it for hours on end. It also might be interesting seeing how certain sectors of industry are clustered near each other (think semiconductors in Silicon Valley), and how that might make the whole city or area’s map look.