Sylvain Zimmer

Once more, I’m trying to start blogging again ;-)

I got an iPhone 2 days ago and I couldn’t help starting to develop a Jamendo frontend right away. Here’s where I am after a few hours of hacking ;-)

Jamendo has been hiring for 2 months. It’s not yet over, we’re still looking for marketing & sales people. However the new development team is quite complete. In order of arrival, we hired Maxime (php/python), Gerald (flash/webdesign), Amandine (junior sysadmin), Pierre-Olivier (php) and just two days ago, Eric (senior sysadmin). The last piece of the puzzle will be Jonathan (php/ajax) mid-september.

That was a lot of people in a very short time but we’re already seeing a good team emerge. Okay, maybe not yet so good at fixing the 153 active issues on our bugtracker :) But the one thing we’re learning very fast is… Poker!

Today was our second Poker evening and it was a blast, we’re slowly all becoming addicted (Try this free ajax poker website…) to the calls, raises and all-ins ! No luck (or skill?) for me tonight though, Eric showed us he knows how to bluff and won after 2 hours of fun ;-)

I can’t think of a cooler sysadmin ;-)

A few links : Jamendo Poker Tour on picasa / Jonathan’s post & photos

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:

jamendo was featured a few days ago on barrapunto.com (thanks to our new spanish translator levhita!). Barrapunto is the spanish Slashdot so the word began to spread : we appeared on many spanish blogs. (see on technorati)

What’s really funny about this is that the “Open your ears” motto still hasn’t an official spanish translation, so the bloggers have been coming up with their own translations like “¡Abrete de orejas!” or “Abre tus oídos” :-)

A few trackbacks to some of the great blogs that featured jamendo :

http://www.blogdejacinto.com/jamendo-abrete-de-orejas
http://www.informediario.com/2006/01/jamendo-p2p-musica-creative-commons.html
http://edulix.blogspot.com/2006/01/jamendo-todo-un-descubrimiento-musical.html
http://alquemont.zoomblog.com/archivo/2006/01/08/agradable-sorpresa.html
http://tecnomovidas.bitacoras.com/archivos/2006/01/07/jamendo-busqueda-de-nuevos-artistas
http://www.kt.cl/blog/2006/01/08/jamendo-abre-tus-oidos/
http://trusmis.blogspot.com/2006/01/msica.html
http://spaces.msn.com/members/mmontesp/Blog/cns!1pLcXQONCFgwdSrY5Ly0H3IA!214.entry
http://spaces.msn.com/members/matrixkx/Blog/cns!1p-5CHMXE4cde64qyPl2s2wQ!423.entry
http://locolive.net/archivo/2006/01/musica-libre

Thank you all, now we need some more spanish artists before the official jamendo spanish opening (next week maybe)!

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 ? ;-)

I spent the last two weeks in Metz, both partying with family+friends and commuting to Luxembourg to work on jamendo with the rest of the team.

Right there is a picture I took yesterday : Laurent and Amélie had a little fight in the snow. Guess who lost !! ;-)

Amélie has been doing some great work for jamendo lately, I think more international artists will join us soon thanks to her ! It is also extremely important to have someone who doesn’t have a technical background in the team.

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 :)