The Potential of Mixcloud.com

11:02a.m., Fri 17 Apr 2009

I've been loving mixcloud.com for the last few days.

Over the last few months I've been trawling around looking for decent communities of podcasters on t'web and have, so far, failed to find anybody doing this with any kind of class or success. Huffduffer.com is nice, but not really a community, more a personal tool (I use if in the same way the way I use delicious for bookmarking). Mixcloud has the potential to be the holy grail.

What's neat about Mixcloud is that they do everything - you upload your audio, an image a tracklist and a blurb et voila! you have a radio show. And, apparently it's all legal. User's can't download the shows, only stream them online and users can't listen to individual tracks on demand - only individual shows, so I guess the legal model is similar to that of last.fm.

I should make it clear that it's NOT PODCASTING. Downloading's out, so it's not like you can download audio to an ipod and listen to it. Also, there's no RSS at the moment, but since mixcloud is still in beta, I imagine being able to subscribe to a user via RSS might become a possibility.

What it is though, is a framework that could easily support a community of online broadcasters.

At the moment it's dominated by dance-music afficiandos uploading DJ mixes. And, being called MIXcloud, that's understandable - the project is obviously the brainchild of fans of dance music and DJing. Another clue is that tagging uploads with upto 5 genres seems important. And nowhere are genres more important than dance music: is it hard house? deep house? chill out? trip hop? italian disco?

The simple community features really make the site sing tho - commenting on uploads and a twitteresque follow/following mechanic, really basic profiles. It's not a site that's cluttered with a confusing myriad of community features, there's just enough functionality. It's like blogger for online music broadcasting.

Still in beta, but I have high hopes for it.

The Nick & Gareth Podcast is slowly making it's presence on the site, just so I can play with the site really - and to see if I can get some useful reactions. Drop by, listen, comment and explore some othe other mixes on there, it's easy to find some good stuff.

http://www.mixcloud.com/gareth53/

At the moment you still need an invite to register :( hopefully the heta will becoe more public in the coming weeks.