If I see another screencast using the iMovie default songs, I'm going to go nuts. Music sets the tone for how you want others to perceive your company and choosing a generic soundtrack is like branding yourself boring. In the past, videographers were forced to work with lawyers to gain appropriate licenses for samples. Thanks to the Free Music Archive and a number of other services, we're free to use original songs while still maintaining the rights to attribution. This morning's launch of the Free Music Archive's guest curation series further expands on this environment of collaboration. Sponsor Rather than forcing users to blindly navigate through the seemingly endless supply of CC-licensed tracks, clueless music seekers like myself can look to musicians for inspiration and track discovery. Creative Commons invited developer and ccMixter contributor Victor Stone to curate the community's first guest playlist. Stone's mix is entitled, "Above Ground Collection" as opposed to the underground and experimental tracks we so often see in music file sharing communities. Stone describes this as a playlist of pop and R&B "by producers who have an ear for the popular without sacrificing artistry." For those of us looking for decent demo music, this may be a good place to start. Users can stream and download the curated playlist from the Free Music Archive or they can visit the ccMixter Editor picks for new podcasts, downloads and popular tracks. If you're a startup company in need of a video demo, consider spending the extra hour on ccMixter and choose a song that gets people pumped to register. Discuss

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Free and Better Demo Music with ccMixter

Scott Lockhart used to tell his co-workers in the real estate industry that there was a lot of valuable information to be found by reading blogs. They, like all of us, would try blog search engines and end up frustrated with spam, abandoned blogs and low-quality content. So Lockhart quit his job and built an application he thought could solve that problem by unearthing just the most high-quality blog content concerning a wide variety of niche topics. In doing so, he stumbled onto one of the most important issues in the future of the web - the tension between controlled user experience and chaotic freedom. Sponsor That sounds crazy, but Lockhart's now three-person Atlanta company has actually done a remarkably good job of unearthing good content in a compelling user experience. Regator offers users a curated collection of high-quality sources on more than 500 topics, everything from martial arts to ceramics, aviation, cheerleading, law and Antarctica. Of course there are tech and business channels, too. Regator just got its $2 premium iPhone app into the iTunes store and it's the best "channel clicker" for niche content we've seen yet. There's something a little bit odd about having the borders of your internet limited by someone else, but the Regator user experience is excellent otherwise. It's well designed and fun to use. User experience is key to making the web...usable. I've wished for years that more people got excited about sharing OPML files, bundled collections of dynamic RSS feeds, but that just hasn't happened. Curation, bundles of content, discovery - these are functions of a prolific web that a new crop of services is trying to tackle with good design and tough decisions about openness versus...something else. Regator is an interesting entry into this place of tension and possibility. The new premium iPhone app offers subscription to the selected blogs you like, video viewing, recommendations of related posts and issue tracking by keyword search. You can view the most recent posts from sources, or the most popular posts with other Regator users. But is this just a pretty looking walled-garden? Regator brings to mind an admittedly paranoid but important blog post that consultant Chris Messina wrote this week called The Death of The URL . "I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL...As a user experience designer, [the responsibility lies with] my discipline and peers to provide the right kind of ideas and leadership. If we get the design right, we can empower while clarifying; we can reduce complexity while enhancing functionality; we can expand freedom while not overwhelming with choice. Surely these are the things that good, thoughtful user experience design can achieve! "If I were forced to choose between all the messiness of free will over the 'comfortability' of a contrived existence, I'd choose the red pill, time and time again. And I hope you would too. From WebTV to the tightly controlled iPhone app platform, though - these interfaces can be very compelling to use. One of the risks of a controlled platform, perhaps secondary to the inherent loss of freedom, is that whoever is in control might not do a good job of picking out what shows up. Editorial control risks conflicts of interest and a lack of broad editorial knowledge compared to what topic experts know. It's not an easy role to play. Kimberly Turner is the editor of Regator's selection of blogs. She's a former magazine writer and she works with volunteer reporters and editors who suggest top blogs in niches when they have free time. Turner doesn't believe that Regator is guilty of the sins that Messina calls other companies out for. Whether you're finding sites through Google's algorithm, the community votes at Digg or your friends on Twitter "we all use some service or site to help us find what we're looking for," Turner says "and those are all 'curated' in some way." "Regator's human-powered curation is simply less likely to yield poor quality content than some others'," Turner contends. Thousands of blogs are included on Regator already and Turner says new features like related posts and searches help users "explore and wander into fresh territory rather than getting stuck in a rut and going to the same small subset of blogs repeatedly." So far there are 20 blogs in the wine category for example, just 1 in the beauty/nails subcategory, 4 hockey blogs, 22 law blogs, 3 blogs about cheerleading and 7 about Emergency Medical Services. The service adds new sources based on user suggestions and other discovery methods. Turner says, "once a blog has established itself as a well-written and trustworthy source, we want to make sure it is included." The fact is, though, that if a blog Regator turns you on to then links to another related blog that's not included in the Regator index - you as a user cannot subscribe to it. If the company offered a "suggest" button next to its "share" button in the Regator browser, that could be helpful. Does that sound reasonable? It's not as free-form and dynamic as other services. Collected.info , a new service for sharing and subscribing to other peoples' collections of feeds, is a particularly interesting recent entrant into this market from perhaps the other end of the spectrum. Both services take a little time to get your reading list set up well, but Regator delivers high-quality content from the start. I like Regator and am already using the new iPhone app to discover interesting new content while on the go. A service that gives me access to fresh, high-quality content about ceramics, anthropology and museums with just a few clicks? Sign me up! Still, there's something about the sources available being limited by someone else's choice. It's an interesting tension that may never be resolved - but is the basis for some very interesting software in the meantime. The Regator crew is right to identify as a problem the way people new to this social web struggle to find the best content. They offer a compelling solution to the problem. Time will tell which solutions catch on and what the consequences will be. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank one of the companies that makes it possible for us to bring ReadWriteWeb to you. Groupsite is a long-developed, feature-rich, self-serve, professional grade social networking and collaboration service. If you've got a group of people you want to facilitate online conversation between - you should check out Groupsite. We really appreciate Groupsite's support here at ReadWriteWeb. Discuss

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An iPhone Remote for Reading the Blogosphere: Check Out Regator's New App

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil' s mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels. Sponsor Features The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools. In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work. Turn Your Blog Into a Book If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image. Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost . These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle. Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords . Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week. Discuss

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FastPencil: Turn Your Blog Posts into a Published Book