ReadWriteWeb

Last week, I got a kind of tweet I hadn't seen before. It was an audio-tweet from TinyVox, an app for iOS and Android that lets users send voice messages to anyone on the Web or just keep them as memos. That doesn't sound like a new idea, but that's the point. As you can see from the interface, TinyVox is all about recovering an old, beloved medium we've lost: the heartfelt mixtape.

My audio-tweet was from Srini Kumar, developer of TinyVox. He wanted to know what I thought of the app's "voicemail on Twitter" approach and its retro cassette tape aesthetic. I said I'd be happy to check it out on the condition that we conduct our interview asynchronously, back and forth over TinyVox. So we did, and I learned more about communication than any social app has taught me in a while.

SoundCloud, the up-and-coming social audio publishing platform, is endorsing HTML5's role in the future of the Web. Today, the Berlin-based startup is officially rolling out its HTML5 audio player as the service's default, knocking the original, Flash-based player from that esteemed position.

The new player first went into beta in November, giving those curious enough an opportunity to experiment with it. Now that the bugs have been ironed out and a few new features added, the widget is ready for prime time.

The digital product team over at NPR is always busy tinkering away and creating new ways for people to consume the news organization's rich library of content. Their latest innovation, called the Infinite Player, is a stripped-down, browser-based tool for listening to NPR content in a serendipitous, yet personalized fashion.

If the player's interface reminds you of Pandora, it's no accident. The team deliberately borrowed from personalized media services like Pandora, Flipboard and Zite when building out the Infinite Player. Its controls are sparse, containing only a few buttons. Among them are a pair of icons for voting stories up and down, much as one would on Pandora. In time, the player learns what you're interested in and plays back content accordingly.

If you were having trouble streaming dubstep remixes hosted on SoundCloud lastnight, you're not the only one. The site fell victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the company confirmed on its status blog today.

The social audio-sharing site experienced several hours of intermittent downtime yesterday as SoundCloud's engineers fought off the attack.

Something I've believed since I began work for ReadWriteWeb is that nothing we write about here exists in a vacuum. No matter how obscure or specific or rarefied, every story we tell is about someone somewhere doing something. War, the economy, revolution, social movements - everyone everywhere is affected by everything. So when I saw what my best friend, Kelvin Holland, had done, I saw, among other things, a story about us.

Lo these many years ago, Kelvin and I met at what became Ask.com. He wound up as the Head of Testing and I ran corporate projects. He now works in the DC area as the web producer for a history publisher. It was there he met Al Webber, a jazzman of the old school. Al recently passed away, but not before technology empowered Kelvin to capture, preserve and share a part of the man's ineffable essence.

Universal Music Group, largest of the "big four" music companies, has made the single largest donation of music ever to the Library of Congress. The donation consists of over 200,000 metal masters, discs and tape from the late Twenties to 1950. Highlights include the master of Louis Armstrong's version of "AintMisbehavin.mp3" and Les Paul's "Guitar Boogie."

Although conserving such a large and important collection of American music is important in general, what makes it really exciting are the plans to digitize it and make it available online.

The British painter and video artist "Stanza," has spent a couple of decades traveling around the world. Every place he'd stop, he'd grab audio tape (then digital recordings) of the sounds of that place. In 2000, he started posting sound-maps online and in 2004 he made the database available. Now, Soundcities is an extensive, open-source sound and mapping site that users can freely take from and contribute to. There are even on-site mixing decks to allow anyone with a computer to remix the world.

I first came across the site only today, when an old friend, the perennial exile activist and writer Sokari Ekine, tweeted a blog post on the site, which she'd been using as an antidote to living in Florida. (My words, not hers.)

George Ewart Evans, the pioneer of British oral history, collected 250 recordings of around 170 individuals born largely in the 1880's and '90s. That collection is now accessible online via the British Library, pioneers in their own right.

The George Ewart Evans Collection "document(s) rural life and agricultural work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, folk beliefs about animals, medicine and witchcraft, folk and popular songs."

While much of the emphasis on multimedia content on the web involves playback, Mozilla is working to extend recording capabilities in the browser as well. Today Mozilla Labs has released an early version of a new add-on for Firefox - Rainbow - that will enable web developers to access local video and audio recording capabilities in the browser.

The add-on generates files that are encoded in open formats - Theora for video and Vorbis for audio in an Ogg container. These files are accessible in DOM using HTML5 APIs, which can be used to upload them to a server.

We've recently come across an app that literally brings its users "talking pictures."

Essentially, Fotobabble attaches an audio caption to any image you can upload. It's a cute, fun way to share and narrate photos with friends, and could even be useful for certain kinds of online businesses - for example, photographers who wanted to explain more information about a particular shot or online retailers who wanted to give potential customers details about a product. Can Fotobabble accomplish these tasks better with audio than conventional text-based captions do now? Read on and tell us what you think.