Idiomag: Sweet Online Music Magazine Now With Attention Data Import
Idiomag is a fascinating project that combines syndicated media content, user feedback, recommendation technology and now Attention Data to produce a very attractive personalized "web magazine" about music.
It's applications like this that make me love my job reviewing what's new on the web.
Live for just over a year, the Idiomag site has just added the ability to pull in your listening history from a variety of other services (Pandora, Last.fm, iLike, Mog and MyStrands) in order to personalize your content. Unannounced but also newly available is APML import, a very exciting means to allow users to personalize web content based on their activity on any other site that supports APML export. Though APML is just in its infancy, Idiomag may quickly become the showcase example of a site that supports import of the data format.
I don't know why more sites don't take some stab at accepting inbound APML and offering personalization of content, but I sure am glad to see this site doing so. The APML page on Idiomag could use some explanation and I don't see that it's linked to elsewhere on the site - but there's not a whole lot of demand yet either. What's important is that this service is in the game.
The degree of personalization is really impressive. The video below demonstrates how Idiomag pulls in syndicated content from all over the web and assembles it seamlessly. The automated integration of text and media is particularly striking.
Just like Pandora or Last.fm, your recommendations get increasingly fine tuned by voting for each "article" you like or dislike. My APML file doesn't have much music in it but I plugged my Pandora profile into Idiomag and am already discovering some cool new music. It's an awesome product that is best experienced by trying it out.
The biggest problem with the service is probably its limited content. It's only useful for some musical genres and is far from unlimited in what it offers even in those. For a quick, personalized, daily read with some videos and videos, though, I'm really impressed.
Check out this video below to see how it works.
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The first link is broken dude. :)
Thanks David, in my overwhelming enthusiasm I forgot how to spell the damn company's name. Thanks for letting me know.
This looks like a cool website. How do they make money?
Fabian, there are affiliate links to buy songs played on the site throughout.
You can enjoy the music on your mobile phone with www.bywifi.com. It is a mobile website which provides searching, saving and realtime transcoding 3GP video services for mobile phones. It also optimizes Web pages for mobile phones, providing a richer browsing experience.
As someone who has been following idiomag from the early days, I have to say they have progressed significantly since the early days. Few startups allow this kind of personalisation.
As someone who has been following idiomag from the early days, I have to say they have progressed significantly since the early days. Few startups allow this kind of personalisation.
Since I happen to have created a web service that will generate an APML file based upon my music listening behavior (see tastebroker.org) , I thought I give it a try. I plugged in the URL ( http://TasteBroker.org/apml/last.fm/lamere ). But alas, it didn't work - I received the Idiomag error page (Oops! Something seems to have gone wrong!).
Perhaps the folks over at IdioMag can help drop me a line so we can figure out where things are going awry - what good is a standard for taste portability if it isn't really portable!
Hi Paul,
That isn't very good is it! I've had a look through, and it should all be sorted now. The problem was because http://TasteBroker.org/apml/last.fm/lamere points via to the actual location at http://research.sun.com:8080/AttentionProfile/apml/last.fm/lamere. Unfortunately we hadn't expected anyone to be using frames with their APML files, but it now caters for as well and should be good to go!
Best,
Ed