Here’s an intro to the wacky world of MP3 Blogs and info on how YOU can have one-click audio played from right inside your blog or website. Woo hoo! Want to tell people about a cool podcast? Or a nifty song? You can make it easy for them to listen with this tool described below.

So it’s been a pretty busy day so far for me, but not as busy as these folks! The coolest thing I’ve found online today has been this awesome 1975 musical performance titled “Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office.” Give the little play button a click and check it out as you read the rest of this post!

Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office

Isn’t that awesome! I found it via on one of many MP3 Blogs now available online, this one called Aurgasm. The post for this song itself, with comments etc. is here.

Other MP3 Blogs I’ve found (via my awesome brother Tom) include The Hype Machine and Elbo.ws but there are lots and lots online. Del.icio.us contains 607 items tagged “mp3blog,” though at least some of them are probably directories of mp3blogs. The most popular items in that tag space are here and include The Hype Machine, Aurgasm (so my brother knows what’s hot) as well as sites like 3Hive (looks very cool) and music.for-robots.com.

These sites are on less that fully solid legal ground, but they are pretty darned cool if you ask me. Standard practices include posting links after every song to buy the album from the artist, a message on the sidebar urging you to pay for music at least some of the time and a note to anyone who owns copyrights on any of the music posted saying “just let me know if you want me to take your song down and down it will come – no problem.”

Snip… out goes the discussion of competing theories of intellectual property rights.

Anyway! So you might be wondering, “how do these sites put little play buttons that enable me to play these files without leaving the page?” Like these:

Rhythm’N’Brass by The Special Guests
Via 3Hive

Galaxies, by Laura Veirs (very beautiful song!)

Via music.for-robots.com

I don’t even have these songs on my server! And you can listen to them without leaving my site – wow!

How did I do it? Hours of painful toil! No, it wasn’t that hard actually. I just viewed the source code of the Aurgasm buttons, copied and pasted them into my blog post here, and changed the URL of the song being pointed at. Wow! It’s all made possible via Fabricio Zuardi and Andre Cardozo’s awesome open source XSPF Web Music Player. To learn more about this rad tool, check out this page and this page, both on the open source community site Sourceforge.

You don’t need to know about that stuff though just to use the tool. I am going to try to figure out how to make a bookmarklet for this code, but I don’t have time right now. But you can copy and paste the code from my site, replace the parts here with the mp3 filename you want to play and the title, and paste it into your own site.

It’s taking me too long to make the code appear as code in this blog post, so just go up to your browser’s View menu and “view source code” for this page. I’ll surround the code you want with asterisks and you can copy and paste it into your own blog posts or site.

Just look at the letters and symbols right around the file URL real close before you paste over them. You can do this! It’s not really very hard. Feedback: My brother just emailed and reminded me that it would be a good idea to include a direct link to the file that this tool streams, so folks can download it too.

Does this have you totally pumped up or what? (I’m stoked.) Well here’s something else to listen to, my Net Squared coworker Britt Bravo explaining how volunteers can plug in to the Net Squared community. Maybe your enthusiasm will spill over and you’ll go profile a non-profit group or two.

Britt Bravo on how you can help Net Squared (6 mins)

While you listen, here’s Britt’s blogs at NetSquared and at her Big Vision Career and Project Consulting.

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