Sylvain Zimmer

It’s time to support the Commons! Creative Commons is holding its annual fundraiser drive. I just donated $50 and thus joined the new CC Network.

Other bonuses of the donation include t-shirts, usb keys, signed copies of Lessig’s new book, etc.. so check it out and donate today ;-)

Speech about innovation, openness and creative commons

Joining us via skype, wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks about open source search engines

I just got back from Wikimania 07 in Taipei. I had the chance to present Jamendo twice, both at a Creative Commons Taiwan conference and at Wikimania itself.

This week in Taipei was a real eye-opener, I met a lot of people and discovered some new interests… more on that later.

In the meantime, here is my presentation:

Everything at jamendo is crazy these days. Albums are coming in faster and faster, we got a link on Creative Commons, the word is spreading about us in French press, translators are knocking to the door every day … The future has never looked so bright.

I still manage to release a new feature each week on the website, but it’s getting harder to stay in sync with the overall status of the project. I released the new backoffice for artists a week ago after a few days of testing and everything went fine ;-) The next big thing we are going to work on is the new member area (improved registration, profile, recommendations, “blog this album” feature, …)

In the meantime, I spoke with Mike Linksvayer from CC who recommended me for an internship in San Francisco this summer. Simply amazing! Entering the CC sphere was one of my main motivations when I created jamendo. Maybe I could have done it simplier but anyway… it’s not done yet. The only problem if I go there is… will I come back to France ? ;-)

We’re now more than 400 torrents to seed on jamendo. That’s about 100Go. We currently use btlaunchmany.py but I don’t think that’s sustainable. So before it’s too late, I think I have to reconsider a new solution to this problem.

As we also operate the tracker, I think there’s really some cooperation needed between both sides, the tracker and our permaseeds. Here are a few of my ideas :

• We don’t need to seed files that are already seeded by many users. Let’s find a lower limit, like 5 seeds.
• But we have to make sure they really seed ! So we need to make some control on the uploaded/downloaded statistics of the client. Are they reliable ?
• Maybe some clients will send the IPs of our servers to the other bittorrent clients, or even use Azureus’ DHT. So we have to really stop seeding these files.
• As the seeds are permanent, it should be easy to store their IPs in the tracker, and turn off announce on the seeds.
• Use that ultraseeding feature ?
• Would it help to turn off the seeds when there’s no client downloading ?

Just some thoughts… TBC

YouTube just launched, it’s the flickr of video. All this “web 2.0″ stuff really got my attention last week, and we’re clearly heading to that now with jamendo. Maybe we’ll become the flickr of audio. Or something like that. Here is our todo-list to add web 2.0 “compliance” to jamendo :

• more Javascript/podcast/RSS syndication tools
• rework URLs. they are way too obscure right now
• folksonomies
• more CC integration
• test the XSPF flash player in order to be really “web only”. for P2P we’ll have to wait I guess.
• we already have a public XMLRPC API, but try to extend it a bit more.
• more social features in the website

If you think of more web 2.0 features just tell me ! We’ll see in a month what I’ll have implemented :)

Two photos from the first jamendolive… The first was taken at the very end when everyone but the four jamendo staff members was gone :) From left to right : Vianney, Clement, me and David. What a GREAT concert it was ! You can check out the jamendo gallery for more shots. The second is a nice narcishot ! :)

We’ve been working since yesterday on the first really big jamendo banner, in order to use it tomorrow at the first european Creative Commons concert :)

It’s been quite hard since the banner is 6m long, and we made it with paint bombs (don’t know the right word, hope you’ll understand :)

I hope tomorrow will ROCK, after 3 long months of planning :)