Who Moved The Furniture?

Just a quick heads up on some the changes (more like slight modifications) going on around here, just in case you were curious…

To recap, the “purpose/goal” of this site in its present incarnation is to be/become an aggregator of the various happenings on the ‘Net as they relate to sites that follow and write about ’soul’ music (predominantly soul, R&B and funk as the main course, with a healthy helping of jazz, blues and gospel thrown in as appetizers and/or dessert {smile}). This all came about early last summer when I finally tired of the dribble that makes up today’s commercial radio industry and went online to locate some new and interesting music to listen to. Unfortunately, while there are a goldmine of music sites out there, I never discovered a single site that could point me to all of the other quality soul music sites on the Internet. I mean… there are a lot of aggregator-type sites for many other topical categories online, especially for various computer technologies and/or “Web 2.0″ companies. There is even an excellent site (IMHO), The Hype Machine, that “keeps track of songs and discussions posted on the best music blogs”. It’s very comprehensive and covers a wide variety of musical genres, but mostly slanted towards rock and indie stuff. I wanted to find something similar, but focused on soul and R&B music.

Well… like the saying goes, “if you don’t like the news, go out and make some”, since I couldn’t find a soul/R&B music aggregation site I decided to try my hand at creating one. And here we are. Of course, as I have mentioned before and probably will continue to mention for the foreseeable future, this place is very much a work-in-progress. I have no illusions that right now, at this moment NetInfoWeb 2.0 qualifies as a soul music site aggregator in the true sense of the word, but that is and remains its goal.

Heh, for a short “recap” this is starting to resemble a Sunday morning church sermon, eh? {smile}. Let’s get back the the main point of this post, the new ‘furniture’, shall we? I’ll just quickly bullet-point the main changes worth noting along with some short (I promise!) commentary. Perhaps in a follow-up series of messages I’ll go into some of the technical details of the various technologies described below.

In order to supply this place with a consistent stream of new information for you to see when you visit (you do visit often, don’t you?) I’ve added a few different scripts and/or widgets to the site:

1. Technorati Favorites Widget - shows the three most recent posts from blogs in your Technorati Favorites (their fancy name for a blogroll list). After adding a blog to your Faves (as they also like to call it) any posts to that blog will display on your site in the widget (title of post with a link back to the originating site).

2. Headline Animator by FeedBurner  - “…an animated banner that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. It’s an easy way to promote your content anywhere you can place a snippet of HTML”. I use this on NetInfoWeb to display the recent posts on my mp3blog, Rhythms In Black Satin (RIBS) and vice versa.

3. MyBlogLog: Recent Readers & Top Links - MyBlogLog is a fascinating (IMHO) service whose goal is to help blog owners build a community around their blogs/sites. The Recent Readers and Top Links widgets let me see other MBL members who have visited my site and also what links on the site generated the most interest in the past 24 hours. Highly Recommended!

There are a few more new “toys” to talk about, but I have to stop now. I’ll edit this post and finish up the overview later this evening… To Be Continued…  WMTF part 2

Technorati Tags: netinfoweb, feedburner, technorati, mybloglog, musestorm

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