DanLin.net

Remember those mix tapes your buddies use to make you? Ok, maybe if you are under 25 years old you probably haven’t even seen a cassette in real life. But take my word for it, it was cool at one point in time.

Muxtape is bringing back some retro-chic to the online music sharing community. It allows you to make a MP3 online ‘muxtape’ up to 12 songs at 10 MBytes each. The design and execution is dead simple but some how very appealing. It looks like someone made it in their bedroom when they were grounded by their parents. Its design is also clearly Apple inspired with its iphone-esque interface but i suspect it does not work on an iphone since the music is played via a Flash media player embedded on the site.

Take a look for yourself and I’ll be waiting to hear your very own muxtape.

Driftr.com is a new traveler centric social networking site. I just got my invite last night and gave it a quick spin around the block.

The alpha release has a nice and polished Web 2.0 design with plenty of AJAX. As it is still a alpha release, many of the features are still not enabled. The site lets you log the time, place and details of the trips you have taken and organizes them via a visual map display or chronological drop down list. You can upload photos directly to driftr.com or link your flickr photos to their site via the flickr API.

Driftr allows you to enter places you stayed as well as places you ate at which I guess will eventually allow them to build a database of user reviews to compete with Yelp.com.

The current implementation is very basic but it has promise assuming more useful features are added. A few that come to mind are trip planning and peer recommendations. I’ve got a few more invites so let me know if you want to try it out.

Screen shots

MySpace today (actually the time is dated in the future at the time of this post. interesting) is alerting their users that YouTube.com seems to be running ’slow’ today. Ummmm. I’m not so sure its true. Especially went the recommended fix by our friend Tom is to REMOVE ALL YOUTUBE VIDEOS. Good one. I wonder if anyone got suckered into this one…

Apparent Google Adsense thinks my Jaiku page is pretty gay. And by gay I mean blogging about horse breeding.

Digg.com has been using John Battelle’s Federated Media for their ad serving ever since the initial investment by Omidyar Network. Being funded by the same guy and all. But recently it looks like Digg has ditched FM in favor of their ex-ad server Google Adsense. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed this? Is there any story behind the switch? It seems that Federated Media would be able to fetch a higher CPM rate by selling ads using their sales people than the ‘we’ll make it up in volume’, notoriously under paid system Google offers. I suspect that Digg might be in talks with Google about an acquisition deal. That would explain why Digg is favoring adsense exclusively to show Google why they are worth the $150M price tag they are asking. It’s just my speculation and contribution to the Google rumor mill. Thank you very much.