February 11, 2009

Share your listening habits with the community

One of my first posts for the DigMediaRev blog was about Twitter and how I find it to be an interesting media and entertainment experience. I promised in the post to explain how I connect, discover, and share content on Twitter. I covered connecting with content in that first post. In a follow up post, I demonstrated how http://search.twitter.com allows you to discover fellow fans of bands you may like. But how do you easily share entertainment content with your network of followers on Twitter? I will show you some tools and services that enable such sharing. The payoff in sharing content with your community is ultimately you are helping them discover more content, and content they may buy. (By the way, a interesting, but very provocatively titled report on the web and content discovery can be found here.) I created a video demonstration of content sharing tools for Twitter and other social networks, just click on through to see the video demo. Thanks!

I remember at Oracle World 2006, Cisco CEO John Chambers demonstrated how a sports fan could share their viewing experience with friends and family. I think the same love of sharing sports with your family and friends applies to music. It’s human nature - we want to share the experience of what we are currently listening to with our friends. For instance, I remember equipping my 1986 Ford Escort with a giant stereo system just so everyone in the neighborhood could hear the funk I listening to. Now I realize that’s a bit obnoxious! So I’ve taken sharing my music selections to the web, it’s a bit safer

For instance, I recently simply stated that on Twitter that I was listening to Charles Mingus. Within a few minutes, a member of my Twitter community chimed in about my choice:

Well, I updated my status manually there on Twitter - meaning I just wrote in that I was listening to Mingus. That update about Mingus also got syndicated to Facebook, using the Twitter application for Facebook. A member of my Facebook community also commented on my choice.

Instead of entering what you are listening to manually by typing it in, there are many web tools that will automatically broadcast what you are listening to right now in your favorite media player, sending information about the music across many social media platforms. Let me show you two such tools in the following video demonstration. I used WebEx to create this demonstration, and then converted it to a video file to upload to Blip.tv. This is a bit of a first time experiment for me, so I would love your feedback. Some links mentioned in the video are listed following it for your reference. Feel free to use the comments to ask any questions - thanks.