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SoundCloud wants to make it easier to listen to music and other embedded audio files from any device. The popular social audio-sharing service announced today that they've launched an HTML5 player for audio clips, allowing playback on tablets and smartphones.

Until now, the SoundCloud player, like so many of its kind, was built in Flash. The service has native apps for Android and iOS, which are lovely, but not terribly useful when one stumbles across a sound clip embedded on a Web page while browsing from an iPad or iPhone.

The social audio sharing site SoundCloud upgraded its iOS app today, adding a tablet-friendly UI for iPad users. The app lets users find and listen to tracks, comment on waveforms, connect with others and record audio using the iPad's microphone.

Most of the functionality from the service's Web app is here. If you've seen the SoundCloud Mac App for the desktop, this is a very similar experience.

A music discovery app for iOS that went live recently shows just what's possible when digital music services open up their libraries and functionality via powerful APIs. Twist Radio takes the music recommendation engine from Last.fm and uses it to help users explore music from SoundCloud.

The result is an app that lets users discover more obscure, independent and often homemade music, rather than a catalogue of music that's only been formally released by record labels. That's because SoundCloud hosts mostly user-generated music, including covers, mashups and original compositions. Some more established artists and labels have even embraced Soundcloud and uploaded commercially released albums to the service. It's essentially the YouTube of audio.

One of the talking points of Mary Meeker's presentation at Web 2.0 Summit yesterday was the future of sound. Meeker claimed that sound would soon be bigger than video on the Web. Specifically, she name-checked Spotify, Siri and SoundCloud. Siri is already a part of Apple, but the other two startups are independent. One of them could well be the next YouTube, if sound ends up having as big an impact on the Web as video. But that's a very big if...

Immediately after Meeker's presentation, I sat down with SoundCloud's young co-founder and CEO Alexander Ljung. I wanted to find out just how Ljung and the SoundCloud team plan to take their service to the mainstream.

SoundCloud may have been knocked offline by a DDoS Attack last night, but today it's back and fully integrated into content curation platform, Storify.

Storify launched its public beta version in April of this year, and quickly became a popular platform for online content curation. Storify allows users to pull information from social media - tweets, videos, photos, links - in order to build stories, and SoundCloud is a smart, seamless way to add original music to the stream. It's an easy way to stitch together a diverse array of content into a news stream, a homeknit story, or just a curious experiment, like the aggregated nyan cat content below.

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.

Corndog megaband Blink-182 is the latest popular culture phenom to hop aboard the social web gimmick train, partnering with geodata provider SimpleGeo and cloud music service SoundCloud to serve up new music in a cool experience. As promotion for the band's forthcoming next album, a new microsite called Neighborhoods.Blink182 now allows fans to listen to previews of the music and chat along with other people in the same offline neighborhood they are in. SimpleGeo helps determine the name of the neighborhood that matches your physical location and SoundCloud serves up the music.

The Next Web's Drew Olanoff says "it's a similar listening and chat experience to what you'd find on Turntable.fm" and while I can see why he'd say that, it doesn't feel that cool to me. It's one band, listeners are unable to listen to the full songs Update: apparently I was wrong about that and songs are available in full, there's no creative control on the part of DJs. But yes, you can listen together with people near you. Geographic proximity could be a cool addition to Turntable.fm, in fact.

There are no shortage of consumption apps on the Web, especially since the iPad (in many ways the ultimate Web consumption device) arrived on the scene. But what about content creation apps? In the Web 2.0 era, we saw the rise of blogging platforms, social networks, and media sharing services like Flickr and YouTube. Some people say that 2011 will be about content curation, via services like Twitter and Tumblr. But I think there's still a lot of action in the content creation space. I'll be exploring some of the best and most promising content creation services over the coming weeks here on ReadWriteWeb, in a series called 'The Creative Web.'

The first service we'll look at is a startup from Berlin, Germany, called SoundCloud. It's a platform to publish music and audio to the Web - and it's been experiencing rapid growth.

Bill Tancer, Hitwise GM of Global Research recently wrote about MySpace's departure as a top traffic generator for entertainment and music sites. Says Tancer, "MySpace was the most significant contributor of traffic to entertainment - multimedia sites providing over 35% of traffic to the category...that percentage now hovers below 10%."

According to The Leading Question's recent research report, as many as 65% of UK teens are streaming music on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, file-sharing has decreased significantly since the Digital Britain Report consultation to address illicit P2P file sharing. While music sharing sites have come and gone due to funding, legal issues and lack of users, here are some of the streaming sites that continue to thrive.