I just read this article about jiwa.fm - article in French.

They explain that jiwa.fm which made a deal with Universal Music will eventually contain more than 250000 music titles, which people will be able to play for free online.

The site is sponsored by advertising (banners on the site).

There are more titles than on deezer.com, on which I wrote an article previously, and I could not wait to try it out.

So I created an account and tried to play some music I could not find on deezer.com but I was able to find there.

I unfortunately was unable to play any music from the site, which looks perfectly fine (all the songs / albums are available, but pressing the play button does not do anything. I tried in firefox, opera, internet explorer and could not get it to work. I disabled pop up blocker, ad blocker, antivirus but it did not change anything.

I therefore have the impression that jiwa.fm use the same geo-ip technology as deezer.com to disable most of the site to other countries than France. I was not able to find any documentation anywhere regarding that problem though.

A couple of my French friends tried it from France and it worked in their end.

I will look for a solution, but at the meantime if anyone knows what the problem is, or knows how to use the site outside of France please let me know.

EDIT: the geoip problem is confirmed by this site (article in French). They explain that most of the music is only accessible from France. This is a legal issue (same thing as Deezer). I will edit this post if I find out more. At the same time keep me updated too!

Thanks :-)

Edit 20/04/08:
I have been trying to use the TOR network with Jiwa.fm and it never really worked. I once managed to get a french IP from the network but it was really too slow to use, and i always gave up. I tried again this morning, got a Canadian IP (Calgary) and it works perfectly fine! This makes me wonder why the site works in Calgary and not in England. It certainly has to be with licences as it was suggested by anonymous.
Now the only problem is that next time I start using the TOR network I will get another IP, likely to be from another country, which may not work or which may be too slow.
I am positive I will find a durable solution though :)

Labels: free music online, geoip, jiwa, new technology, tip

I had to design a website for a house on sale lately. I was looking for the best way of putting up a map of the area and pinpoint the location house on it.

I came accross the google ajax map search wizard, which from a combination of information (postcode, house number, area name, etc) generates a control which code you can just copy and paste in your html.

The height and width of the control is adjustable, you can search for places on the map, zoom in and out and drag the map around from within the control, it really is having a google map in your site.

It's great, and the result looks awesome on the webpage (EDIT: there is now an English version of this page)

Labels: google, interactivity, map, self promotion, tip, web design

If, like me, you have been using the site deezer.com , you may have noticed that most of the songs are greyed out, and there is no way of playing them.

For those who do not know it, the site deezer lets you play music online for free. The site is neat and the interface friendly and easy to use. And most importantly the choice of music is quite important.

After some research, I found out that the site is based in France (by that I actually mean the company), and if you are accessing the site from outside of France then for copyright reasons you won't be able to play most of the songs (they use GeoIP location for that, which is finding out where you are from your IP address).
Fortunately there is a trick, for firefox users (and opera users apparently, although I have not tried it).

First you will need to download greasemonkey , a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.

Once you have installed it install the Deezer Version 2 Unlocker.

And there you go, you should now be able to use deezer as if you were in France, and have access to all of the songs and albums.

(once you're at it you might as well install the deezer ads remover)

Please let me know if you know of other ways to use deezer outside of France, say on internet explorer for instance.

Labels: deezer, free music online, geoip, new technology, script, tip