• 09/28/2008 - My Lovely Wife Lou is Pregnant
• 12/14/2007 - ArtistServer News and a new site: FreeMusicLicensing.com
• 09/18/2007 - AritstServer and ToneThis Serve Up Indie Ringtones
• 09/11/2007 - Running LightTPD and PHP on Windows
• 09/06/2007 - Compete.com -vs- Alexa.com - Comparing Website Rank
• 08/29/2007 - HostMySite.com Limits ColdFusion, Does Not Tell Customers
• 08/14/2007 - New Song: Chocolate Rain - Sonic Remix
• 08/03/2007 - If You Use Open Source, Leave the License and Credit
• 07/31/2007 - Add Links to Profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and More
• 07/23/2007 - SocialNetwork.in API Promotes Cross Site Networking

Last month I posted about my adventures with geocoding and posted a screen design of an idea I had for ArtistServer. That idea bounced around my head some more and mutated into a new Website I'lll be launching sometime in the next 2-3 months depending on my schedule.

http://www.mp3maps.com/

MP3maps is going to be a Map 'mashup' (Yahoo! or Google) and the Music and Data of ArtistServer.com

Through this site, you'll be able to see where music is coming from in interesting ways...

• View the Distribution of Genres across the planet
• View the Distribution of an Artist's Fans
• Display a Playlist, Showing the Origins of Songs
• View a Map of Your Listening History (if you are a member of ArtistServer)
• and more...

MP3Maps is under development and will serve the same function as ArtistJukebox.com, which is what I call a "Satellite" or simply, "Rebranding Yourself" - which is where you rebrand your service/content as a means to stimulate more traffic and awareness by providing alternative means and interfaces to the same core service/content.

Here is an initial screen design for MP3maps.com - I'm sure it will evolve by the time it goes live. http://www.artistserver.com/files/mp3maps.png

Here is a conecpt design for a geocoding idea I recently had for ArtistServer:

artistserver.com/files/GeocodeArtist.png

The idea here is to visualize the data that exists within ArtistServer. This can happen in many ways, especially if the users of the site are geocoded to their city or state or country. Geocoding refers to the geographical point of a location.

To find your geocode - try here: http://brainoff.com/worldkit/geocoder/

Once the users of ArtistServer all have geocodes in the database, the following could be created/visualized on an image of Earth:

• Distribution of Genres across the planet
• Distribution of an Artist's fans
• or an Artist or Member's Friends
• a visual representation of a playlist
• a map of your listening history
• ability to browse for music by a map
  

The same goes for the images in the Gallery (once the gallery is done).

This is all just concept stuff right now, but, I am starting to experiment both with Yahoo Maps API, and soon an Open Source Flash Map solution. Once I have a prototype of some sort online, I'll post the URL.

I've already made the first step, by writing some ColdFusion custom tags that connect to two different Geocoding services, and am almost done Geocoding everyone in the database. Once that's done, I'll do it to the Country table in the database for country based reports/visualizations. For the US geocodes, I connected to Yahoo! and used their API. For the International and locations that Yahoo wasn't able to process were sent through ZeeMaps - here's the link to their geocode page: http://www.zeesource.net/maps/geocoding.do

Oh - and I hammered ZeeMaps it seems and had my IP address throttled. I emailed them once I realized this and asked what I should do, or what rule I violated, as they didn't have any restrictions listed on their site. I was stoked to find that Claire at ZeeMaps was working Sunday night too and replied right away. Claire requested that I throttle my requests to 1 every 2 seconds or so and to try again in an hour. After writing back and thanking her for the help, I modified my script to sleep for 2 seconds after each iteration of the loop. An hour later... all was working fine! Thank you so much ZeeSource/ZeeMaps! I think in all, I'll have run over 8,000 geocode requests though their REST interface - something that would have cost me $50 through a commercial service. So check these people out - they have a nice mapping solution, and they're nice people taboot!