macJasp

Cutting down my internet footprint

I got quite carried away over the last 12 months, registering for every social networking site there was at one point but i've taken recent steps to reduce that, closing accounts and securing profiles and generally not openly sharing as much information about myself throughout the web.

I wouldn't say it's total paranoia but I've become increasingly aware of late that I'm registered in places I never even use, sites like ch.mp, audioboo, blip.fm and more.

It's fairly pointless in keeping such sites active when I'm never going to use them, plus it means I cut down my overall internet footprint and just keep myself  in places where I want to be known and where I'm happy sharing information.

I've probably closed around 6 or 7 social networking accounts of mine down already this evening and I feel rather good for it. The one's that remain are the one's I do utilise and which are shown here on the blog and I think I'm happy to keep it that way going forward.

Putting trust in Last.fm

I normally find new music via the usual places, through the radio or from discussions with friends but after constant prodding from the last.fm recommendation service recently about Turin Brakes I decided to take a chance and purchase their Optimist album from 2001. It thinks that because i like Doves, Badly Drawn Boy and Elbow (which I certainly do) that Turin Brakes is right up my street. I don't have a single Turin Brakes record in my collection, I know of one of their songs from the early part of the last decade (2003's Pain Killer), so I'm putting faith in the service to find me this type of new music that I'll hopefully grow to love and begin wondering why I hadn't heard of them sooner, after all that is the whole point of last.fm, right? If anything it's to be an interesting experiment as to whether the site really can work out my musical tastes based on what I play regularly and I'm very much hopeful that this particular choice will enable me to trust the service more in future.

Tweet your loved Last.fm tracks on Twitter

I really like the way you can pick a track on Blip.fm and then tweet it directly to Twitter , being a fan of Last.fm i would love that same integration but that’s just not there at the moment, however there is a workaround available that goes somewhere close.

Twitterfeed monitors RSS feeds from your blog or other websites and then at a specified interval will automatically check for the last ‘untweeted’ feed and tweet it. So by giving it the RSS feed of your loved tracks from Last.fm you can get somewhere close to the Blip.fm fuctionality.

The Last.fm RSS feed will be as follows (here, replacing my username macasp with your own) feed://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/macjasp/lovedtracks.rss Sign yourself up with Twitterfeed, (it’s all secure and uses OpenID) and once logged in add a new RSS feed (as per the image), set the update frequency that Twitterfeed will use to check your Last.fm RSS feed along with your chosen shortened URL link (tinyurl here)

Finally prefix each tweet with #lastfm #love, which seems to be the standard hash tag for lastfm tweets Save the feed and your loved tracks will be tweeted (here within 30 minutes) An example from my own tweets based on the above setup is below to give you an idea how it looks.

The tinyurl link takes you directly to the song in question within Last.fm One thing to note is if you love more than one last.fm track at once, Twitterfeed will only tweet the last loved track.