80 Million Blips, 1 Million DJs Strong, and Content Update

Hey Blippers!  We know it’s been a while since you’ve last heard from us, but we wanted to give you an update on changes to our content sources due to our licensing arrangements.

You will continue to be able to access YouTube, and we will be adding significant content partners shortly, but (sadly) other sources will go away.  The good news is that we have just added nearly one million pristine licensed tracks and plan to add more in the near future.

Please help us with any comments or feedback as we’ve appreciated your support over the past 3 years!  Together we’ve grown to a million Blippers who have DJ’d over 80 million posts.  We have you to thank for that and we are truly grateful.

We’ve asked our Ambassadors, @evablue, @daretoeatapeach, and @briangreene to help us in answering questions.  As always, if you have any feedback, be sure to drop us a line at feedback@blip.fm.  Thanks for your support!

Best,

The Blip.fm Crew

Crowd Sourcing Search Results

Why Crowd Source?

Tonight’s maintenance includes the first phase of something we’re really excited about: crowd sourcing search results. Most of you have probably experienced the frustration of finding someone singing a cover version of a song or a poor quality live version filmed from a cellphone instead of the track you were looking for. If all youtube videos had some sort of metadata that identified it as a cover or a live version (or even if people titled things similarly), we could do this ourselves. Unfortunately, that’s not the case; so we need your help!

Phase 1: Flagging Tracks

You’ll find a flag icon to the right of the preview link in search results. If you feel a track should be removed from our results, simply click the flag, choose one of the applicable reasons why the track is bad and click OK.

Phase 2: Independent Review of Flagged Tracks

While the process of flagging bad tracks is going on, we’ll be working on phase 2 of this solution - allowing users to independently verify that a flagged track is indeed bad. The independent review of flagged tracks is necessary to ensure that we only remove bad tracks and not those that are flagged inaccurately or accidentally. Since this process will be a little more tricky than simply flagging tracks, it will likely be gradually rolled out so that we can tweak things along the way.
Stay tuned for that!

As always, there are some small bug fixes included here and there in this code push as well. Thanks for blipping!

–
Yan

Emergency Maintenance

As many of you have realized, our database servers have been overloaded for several hours now. We’ve place the site into emergency maintenance mode in order to get things sorted. We estimate that this window will last around 1 hour. Thanks,

Maintenance Recap: New Embed Widget

The main focus of tonight’s maintenance is our new embed widget. The appearance of the widget is highly customizable so you can make it look good wherever you want to put it. We made the decision to have blips link back to the site as opposed to play within the widget for three reasons. First, given our limited resources, maintaining the widget is much easier without having to update it as we add / remove content sources. Second, we wanted to ensure a consistent experience for all viewers of the widget and avoid any confusion that might stem from some blips being playable (as dictated by content sources) and others not. Lastly, we wanted the widget to be lightweight in order to load quickly wherever it is placed. We hope you like it!

There are some other odds and ends included as well:

• An improved sign-up flow
• Updated search result ordering
• Quicker removal of bad song links
• Various bug fixes

As always, if you have any feedback on the widget or the site in general, be sure to drop us a line at feedback@blip.fm. Thanks for your support!

– Yan

Maintenance Summary

Tonight’s maintenance deals largely with SEO, performance enhancements, and bug fixes. The next release will focus more on user experience and feature updates / additions. Thanks for your patience and support! See you on the other side!

–
Yan