Express Your Music Mood with Muzicons Widgets

Social networking woes got you down? Why don’t you let the world know how frustrated you are by expressing your emotions through a music widget!

Muzicons is a new music sharing site where you can easily create a widget (or Muzicon) to host on your blog. The name, like to ‘emoticon,’ comes from the ability to use icons to show mood, emotions, and whatever it is you are thinking at the time.

Unlike some of the music widgets that exist such as eSnips, MxPlay, and Sonific, Muzicons is the only service that gives users the option of choosing an emoticon and a mood status. You can customize the look of your widget and place it in your Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress or MySpace.

Muzicons may seem ordinary, but they’re David against the Goliath that is the music industry. Since Muzicons was created in Russia, it will not have to adhere to the demands of the DMCA as we saw happen with Imeem when it was sued by Warner Music. Users are free to upload copyrighted music as they see fit.

In my opinion, Muzicons are simply the cutest music widgets I have ever seen.

Check out my Muzicon:

Amazon Offers Explanation For S3 Outage

In a highly unusual occurrence for Amazon, the company’s S3 storage service had an outage yesterday. It left many people scratching their heads. Late yesterday evening, the corporation has decided to take the open explanation path and let the public know what happened behind the scenes.

Nicholas Carr of Rough Type passed along the explanation that Amazon gave to everyone as to what caused this problem. It seems that at approximately 3:30 AM PST on the 15th, a user started sending a high volume of authentication requests through to one of the S3 data centers. Amazon saw this happening, but did not move more capacity through at that time. And when another customer slammed them with requests less than half an hour later, the downfall of S3 commenced. The authentication service was pushed over its maximum level, and it took them time to move more capacity into the right areas. Essentially they ended up with a denial of service attack.

Whether intentional or not, we don’t know. Considering the size of some S3 customers, one has to wonder how two customers could have suddenly needed to send that many requests through to the authentication server. (According to a supposedly leaked internal email that Mr. Carr shows on his blog, at least one Amazon executive wonders the same thing.)

As the S3 storage service is used by services as large as Twitter, this could have had some fairly serious ramifications if it had happened in the middle of the day.

While the questions are sure to linger for some time, Amazon is already taking steps to ensure things like this can not happen again. They are taking steps to up their capacity, build a service health dashboard for customers and add more defenses around the authentication systems.

It is refreshing to see a company being so forthright with their explanations and pointing out their systemic failings. What happened here should have been avoidable. Considering how they tout their service to be greatly scalable with superb uptime, they will have to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

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South India accounts for 40% of airline ticket sales on Internet

The Indian online travel market seems to be driven by the South, especially Bangalore. Around 40 per cent of airline ticket sales on the internet come from the four main South markets of Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kochi, reports Times of India.

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