Blip.fm presents Hypnogaja’s Valentine’s Day Blipaway

This Valentine’s Day, we’ve teamed up with our friends in Hypnogaja to spread a little musical love. Up for grabs are a FREE LG Chocolate Touch Verizon cell phone and a FREE collection of albums from Hypnogaja. All you have to do is, simply click here and blip your favorite Hypnogaja songs to your Twitter account (click “more options” when blipping to integrate your twitter account if you haven’t already done so) with the hashtag #ilovehypnogaja. A winner will be chosen at random, so the more you blip, the better your chances of winning! Entry closes at 12 midnight/PST on February 15, 2010. Good luck and Happy Valentine’s Day from Hypnogaja and Blip.fm!”

Tonight’s Update

Hey everybody. Wanted to give a quick rundown of what tonight’s maintenance is going to cover. Unfortunately, it’s not that exciting, mostly just small tweaks and fixes.

• Tweaks to the search. “-” (dash) and ” ‘ ” (apostrophe) characters have been causing some weirdness / bad results. That has been fixed. The new search also has a number of cool advanced options that we haven’t really covered - look for a blog about that soon.
• Tag Tuner improvements. The tag tuner should be much better at finding blips for artists, genres, and hashtags that you enter manually, not just those in the tag cloud itself. Pagination has also been improved a bit.
• Badge email preference. We like the badges and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, but it was always our intention to make this an optional part of the Blip.fm experience. You can now choose on your settings page to not be notified about new badges you’ve earned.
• Badge email improvements. We’ve added the particular blip that triggered the pioneer badge, and also a general description of each badge in their respective emails, so you know exactly what you did to earn them.
• Fixes to the “block user” function. You will no longer receive any communication (emails) from users that you’ve blocked.
• Backend stuff. As always, there are a number of bug fixes etc… that can’t really be tied to any particular part of the user experience, but they’re important too

See you on the other side!

Dial It In

Tonight we release a few much-anticipated updates to the Blip.fm community. Bear with us as we get the servers ready for world domination. While you’re waiting for the site to open back up, the following will give you a little rundown of what we’re doing right now. BUT: Because I completely forgot to write this blog entry before scheduling the update, I’m going to give you one feature at a time, while simultaneously running update scripts and checking for last-minute bugs. Yes, I’m that good. I hope.

1) The Fabled TagTuner
Fabled you say? I just looked it up in the dictionary widget, and a “fable” a short story with animals and a moral. So I guess it’s not really “fabled”, but more like just “awesome”. Right, so, the TagTuner will debut on the “All DJs” page (http://blip.fm/all), allowing you to filter the overwhelming stream of blips by any combination of artist, genres, and hashtags (those #special #keywords like on Twitter). You can save tag presets for easy access, and easily select whichever one you want. This is huge because it lets you discover both new DJs and new music based on your criteria, and you can change it up to fit your mood.

2) Achievement Badges
At Blip.fm being an active blipper is a very good thing, and we think you should be rewarded for your time spent avoiding the pile of work on your desk. That’s why we’ve come up with an initial set of–hang on, let me count them. Twelve?–12 Badges. Some of them are pretty easy to earn… for level one anyway. Most have at least three ranks you can achieve, and you can read all about how to get the full set of them. We’ll be adding more as we think of them, so don’t think this is the end of it! The icons were created by a badass designer out of Brazil, Everaldo Coelho with Yellow Icon Studios.

For those of you who helped us beta test these new features, we’ve given you a special “beta tester” badge. There’s also one only for those of you who were using Blip.fm back in the early days, back when we were just getting started. Thanks for that.

3) Quick Add/Props
This is a power user feature that has been requested for a while now. Instead of having to go to a DJ’s profile page to add them as a favorite or give props, just roll over any user icon in the blipstream. You’ll see a little bubble menu pop up that gives quick access to the two most often used user actions. Hopefully you’ll stop emailing us about this now. Just kidding, we love you.

4) Block DJ
Ditch the stalkers. ‘Nuff said. OK, a little more could be said. You block them by going to their profile page, and selecting “Block User” from the actions menu (at the bottom right of the info box containing the user info. It has a gear icon on it. You can’t miss it).

5) Weekly Update Emails
We’ll let you know all about what’s been going down at Blip.fm as it pertains to you. We send a condensed weekly email containing the total number of props you’ve received, including the people who sent you the most props, your latest listeners and what they blipped, and the top five blipped tracks of the week. There might be some more stuff in it too, but I forget what it is right now.

6) Better Facebook
We’ve slightly modified the Facebook integration to include the YouTube video or embed a little player whenever possible, so you can hear the song right in your Facebook feed. We figure it’s a helluva lot cooler to be able to hear the music right away. We think you’ll think so too.

There’s probably a few more things in there. We’ve definitely sped up the page load a bit, and fixed a few bugs in the process. The next update to this blog entry will be to let you know that the site is back online. Right now we’re just waiting for all the blips to be processed for the new artist/genre/hash tagging system and we’ll be back. Something like 1.5 million blips in the last couple weeks left to process. Not bad guys.

We heart you.

UPDATE: We’re live again Sorry to make you wait so long. The TagTuner will get better with age, so start blipping now and blip often!

Mainenance: Debut of the TagTuner and Badges

We’re updating the beta site (http://beta.blip.fm) with some huge new features. Details to come after we get the site back online… hang in there, you’re going to like what you see!

All of these features will be on the beta site while we work out all the bugs. We’ll be acknowledging the people who help us squash the bugs, so make sure to send us your feedback!

#1: The TagTuner
This is a big deal in terms of music and DJ discovery. Now instead of sifting through all the noise on the “All Blips” page we make it easy to tune into the music that you want to hear. You are presented with a tag cloud of recent trending topics (broken down into hashtags, artists, and genres). When you select tags, only blips that match those categories will filter through to your blipstream. If you want to hear U2, Madonna and Acid Jazz right now, you got it. Nobody else does this. In fact, we have a patent pending on the concept.

#2: Badges
We’ve been seeing a ton of people do extraordinary things on Blip.fm. Some people find the best music before anyone else, others know how to work the crowd, some DJs get props from tens of thousands of listeners, then there’s the guys that blip all day everyday. We wanted to do something to let you guys show off a bit. After this update, you’ll see a box in the right column with the different badges that you can earn for reaching certain achievements. Some of them are pretty easy to get, others will take a bit more work. We plan to keep coming up with new badges as time goes on, so if you have any ideas for something awesome, send it our way.

NOTE: We’re going to reset these badges once we push all these updates to the main site, so that everyone can start out on a level playing field. Don’t worry though, for helping us work out the kinks you’re going to get something that can’t be got otherwise.

#3: DJ Quick Add/Props
Add any DJ to your favorites or give them props without having to go to their profile page. This is something we’ve had lots of requests for.

#4: Block DJ
Prevent a DJ from sending you @replies and adding you as a favorite DJ. You’ll never see their blips in your personalized blipstream again.

#5: Weekly Update Emails
This one you might not get to see for a little while, until we push the stuff to the main site, but it’s rad. Every week we’ll send you an email with the activity that’s happened over the past seven days (who’s given you props, reblips, new listeners, etc.).

#6: Faster Page Loads
We’re going to spend the next few weeks trying to get your pages loading and playing music super fast. This should be incremental if you use the beta site, so it should keep getting faster as we tweak things.

-ian

Happy Tweetsgiving!

Join fellow Blip.fm DJs for Tweetsgiving, a 48-hour global expression of gratitude, starting Tuesday, November 24th at 9:00am (Pacific)/12:00pm (Eastern) through November 26th. Blip.fm is proud to be a sponsor of this event.

TweetsGiving (http://tweetsgiving.epicchange.org/) is a global celebration that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude.  This 48-hour event encourages everyone to express their thanks by using online tools (such as Blip.fm) and attending live events. Money raised will benefit a school started by “Mama Lucy” Kamptoni, a Tanzanian woman who used her income from selling chickens to build a school that now serves over 300 children near her home in Arusha.

Just blip and tweet your favorite Blip.fm tunes that express gratitude. Include #tweetsgiving and http://bit.ly/TGonline in your tweet. For example, you could tweet: “So grateful to share the holidays with friends! #tweetsgiving - http://bit.ly/TGonline - ♫ http://blip.fm/~gr9yv [We Are Family]

Happy Thanksgiving from the Blip.fm Team