Uncarved

I recently discovered a neat little “trick” on my iPad (and iPhone): I’ve stumbled upon a way to listen to music streaming from Internet radio stations while I do “other things,” like check my email, take photos, or write text messages.

While iPhone OS 4.0 — due out this summer — will finally deliver the long-requested ability to allow users to listen to their Pandora or Last.fm radio streams in the “background” by virtue of its new “multi-tasking” capabilities, the solution I’ve stumbled upon works (in slight variations) today with any device running iPhone OS 3.x.

Although this little trick won’t work with Pandora, since you must be using a Pandora client to stream their music, you can use it with any radio station which exposes its MP3 or AAC music stream via a multimedia playlist file URL (which will typically end in .pls); basically any radio station you’ll find on Live 365, Soma FM, and more.

I’m a fan of Soma FM’s Secret Agent radio station, so we’ll use that for our example; feel free to try this out for any station you like.

The process is super easy, but slightly different between the handheld iPhone OS devices (eg, iPhone and iPod Touch) and iPads (for which it’s actually a bit spiffier), so I’ll take you through the steps for doing it on each one.

iPhone / iPod Touch

Launch Mobile Safari, and head to the following URL:

http://somafm.com/secretagent48.pls

You’ll see the following:

Safari fetches the PLS file URL

Once the playlist file is loaded, Safari will find the URL of the music stream, and start playing the music, and you’ll see this:

Safari has started playing the audio stream

Now — click the Home button and, say, check in on your email. Note that the music continues to play.

Isn’t that fantastic?

Just one caveat, though: you won’t be able to browse other websites in Safari until you click the “Done” button (top left), which — as you might expect — causes the music to stop playing.

One workaround is to use an alternative browser, like iCab, Opera Mini, or any of a number of other web browsers (some paid, some free) available in the App Store.

iPad

Things get a little cooler on the iPad. The steps to get you listening to the music stream are the same, but we can do a few more things once the music starts playing on the iPad.

Once the music starts to play, you’ll see this:

Safari playing the audio stream

Note one key difference to note, however: unlike the iPhone’s Mobile Safari app, the iPad’s Mobile Safari continues to show you the browser chrome up top.

For starters, this means that you may continue browsing other websites in Safari on the iPad by simply tapping the tabs icon at the top:

Change tabs or create new ones.

What’s more you can actually create a bookmark for the radio station, so you can quickly listen any time:

Create bookmarks for your favorite stations

But — and this is where I started to get a little verklempt — it gets just slightly more fantastic: you can bookmark it to your Home Screen.

Now I can fire up Secret Agent FM from my Home Screen, just like Pandora or Last.fm.

Looks like the folks at Soma FM went the extra mile to specify a Home Screen icon for their website. Your mileage will vary with the availability of your favorite station’s dedicated icon for your Home Screen, however, depending on the site publisher.

Meanwhile, go forth and enjoy streaming some music while you’re sending those texts or reading the Times.

Check it out, Tutorials iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, multi-tasking, music, tips

Take this sucker with huge grains of salt.

Not sure how I’d feel about each app having its own keyboard, but who’s to say which details would make it into the shipping version, and which not?

Check it out Apple, rumor, video

Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media, Inc., discussing the idea of government as a platform vs. government as a vending machine at OSCON 2009 (20 mins):

Tim’s thoughts here echo, add flesh around, and enhance some concepts that will be discussed in the piece that I’d been writing throughout parts of my recent vacation to Greece.

A more concise summary of these ideas is also available for those with time constraints (4 mins):

Check it out, Government 2.0 government, Government 2.0, Tim O'Reilly, video

A summary from Web Worker Daily’s 10 Golden Rules of Social Media:

1. Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net: communication and connection to people and information.

2. Listen.

3. Add value. Before posting a message as a new participant in a forum, ask yourself: How is this providing value to the conversation? To the community?

4. Respond.

5. Do Good Things. This goes beyond adding value online. It means fundamentally changing your business model from a single bottom line — profit — to a triple bottom line — people, planet, profit — and then perpetuating this social responsibility to all you do in business, including online marketing and selling.

6. Share the Wealth. In social media, sharing is the fuel of the conversation engine.

7. Give Kudos. Social media works when you are generous. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, but things really take off when you give others praise or a moment in the spotlight. The rise of retweeting — real retweeting, not spammy retweeting — shows how far giving credit to others can go in social spaces.

8. Don’t Spam.

9. Be Real. Authenticity is the secret ingredient behind any good and valuable social media marketing campaign.

10. Collaborate. Before you dive into social media for marketing and selling, take a look at who is out there and who is doing it well. How can you work with them, instead of trying to muscle your way into the space with all of your dollars?
    

The author of the article largely organized it to speak to larger commercial organizations, but the basic points are valuable advice for developing the identity any type of brand on the social Internet.

Check out the full article for a fuller take.

Check it out howto, social media

The Wall Street Journal ran a story on 30 May, titled On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired.

From the article:

Shelter attendants say the number of laptop-toting overnight visitors, while small, is growing. SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. It posts schedules for public-housing meetings and news from similar groups in New Mexico, Arizona and Connecticut. And it has a blog with online polls about shelter life.

The article didn’t link to the “SF Homeless” forum, but I did find this site, which is actually a wiki. If anyone can find the forum of which they speak, please leave a link in the comments.

Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn’t find another when the economy tanked.

When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.

It’s amazing to me that he sprung for the $25 Flickr account. I wonder what he’s photographing, and whether he’s doing something interesting with them; the article doesn’t say.

Livingston surprised me with a poignant perspective, sharing:

… his computer helps him feel more connected and human. “It’s frightening to be homeless,” he says. “When I’m on here, I’m equal to everybody else.”

The article is peppered with vignettes of various personalities from other members of the American homeless population, as well as social services professionals involved in providing Internet access and computer training in shelters, since many housing and job applications must be submitted online.

Check it out social service, technology, wow

A new website, Microsyntax.org is opening its doors. It aims at an attempt to offer some canonization to emergent linguistic conventions that grow organically on Twitter.

Stow Boyd, the site’s founder and only present author, writes:

… [W]e are launching a new non-profit, Microsyntax.org, with the purpose of investigating the various ways that individuals and tool vendors are trying to innovate around this sort of microsyntax, trying to define reference use cases that illuminate the ways they may be used or interpreted, and to create a forum where alternative approaches can be discussed and evaluated.

I’m fascinated by the mission of Boyd’s new site because it implicitly reframes language as action — an event unfolding — rather than a thing. It is a recognition of order emerging from chaos, aiming to assist its development and refinement.

This perspective stands in compelling contrast with arguments that are critical of the influence that technologies such as Twitter (or texting, instant messaging, and the rest) are affecting upon the modern written language; particularly as practiced by young people still in school, who are likely to apply these linguistic practices in “inappropriate” contexts, such as when writing papers.

The main reason language (both written and spoken) serves humankind’s communications needs so well is that we’re able to largely agree upon practices around how to encode and decode ideas, such that their meanings largely survive the transmission.

Notably, Boyd’s new website seeks to bridge the gap between emergent linguistic practices and informal canon.

[via TechCrunch]

Check it out, language language, linguistic evolution, microsyntax

The Symfony project has recently launched the Symfony Components sub-project and website. Its goal is to produce a collection of standalone libraries for PHP.

Although these libraries were initially born for use in the Symfony MVC framework, the talented developers involved in the project have designed them to avoid any interdependencies with any of the other parts of the overall framework. This effort has resulted in components that may be used individually in any other PHP project without requiring the use of any of the rest of the Symfony framework.

The initial round of components include:

• YAML, a parser that translates data between YAML and native PHP arrays;
• Event Dispatcher, which provides a generic event dispatching framework; and
• Templating, which provides parameterized and scope-isolated templating functionality.

I’ll be keeping a keen eye on this project.

Check it out API, PHP, Symfony, Symfony components

CNN has posted an article about a new zombie movie, called Colin, that is causing a stir at this year’s Cannes festival.

But this isn’t your father’s zombie movie:

Online social networking was an invaluable tool in both generating buzz and cheaply sourcing the undead: “We went on Facebook and MySpace and said ‘Who wants to be a zombie?’”

Oddly, I’ve recently mentioned in three separate conversations to friends how I really want to be in a zombie movie before this life is done, so I’m a little chuffed to have missed out on the casting call.

Here’s the trailer:

It also apparently cost a mere $70 US to produce.

Marc Price, the film’s director, explains that the money was spent on “…a crowbar and a couple of tapes, and … some tea and coffee as well — not the expensive stuff either, the very basic kind… Just to keep the zombies happy.”

There’s something deliciously brainy about crowdsourcing the undead.

Check it out Cannes Film Festival, cinema, crowdsourcing, film, social media, zombies

I’m so excited about this, I couldn’t wait to post about it before diving in. I present proudly to you Data.gov.

From the site’s home page:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often.

Thank you, Obama Administration, for sincerely treating federal data as belonging to the People.

Check it out, Linking Out data.gov, government, Obama, web service, wow

One of the amazing things about Twitter’s simplicity is how well it lends itself to utilization in a variety of ways that weren’t explicitly intended when it was initially designed.

Today TwitDoc is launching what appears to be the first service for sharing documents over Twitter, bringing support for PDFs, Microsoft Office Documents, and a bunch of other file formats.

via TwitDoc: Proving That Every File Format Will Eventually Be Shareable Over Twitter.

My only concern is that the widespread practice of people posting Microsoft Office Documents via TwitDoc can quickly turn Twitter into a new vector for malware in the form of naughty Excel macros and such. Hopefully the folks behind TwitDoc will be actively scanning the files uploaded and shared through their service.

Check it out malware, security, startup, Twitter