As Stan noted last week, Muxtape has been voluntarily brought down due to concerns over the RIAA, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from traipsing down that same harrowing path yourself, particularly since there’s now an open source web package you can run yourself to completely duplicate the functionality of MuxTape.

Josh Catone over at SitePoint just found it, it’s aptly called OpenTape. It’s exactly a one-for-one translation of the original MuxTape with one significant difference - a faceless startup won’t be fronting the legal liability for you to post up a virtual mixtape of your favorite artists.  If the RIAA doesn’t like what they hear, it’s all on you, bub.

Josh sees some possible stumbling blocks in the future for OpenTape:

The obvious one is legal: how many people will be willing to risk the RIAA’s wrath to publish a mixtape on their server? The second is content. What made Muxtape great was the ability to browse other mixtapes and find great new music. Without a way to aggregate and discover the mixtapes people are making and publishing with Opentape, it will be less attractive as a distributed service.

Here’s where I see OpenTape succeeding where so many others have failed: the ability to put the server offshore. I’ve actually had a chance to talk to some lawyers on this topic to see if it’d fly like I imagine it would, and I’m told I’m spot on.  During the last time licensing issues came to play in the blogosphere, we were talking about Pandora and their inability to sustain their business while paying 70% of revenue in licensing fees.

What I see OpenTape potentially leading to is a boon for web hosting companies who set up shop in countries with particularly laxy enforcement of copyright, and widespread installation of OpenTape and other similar services. Folks who want to set up a Muxtape clone would be the prime market here. Another potential market would be folks who buy a shared hosting plan to host a few OpenTape instances of their own without getting worried about owing thousands of dollars per infringing song.

Elite Tech News is back now from the doldrums of summers’ relative vacuum of technology news. This week, Jason Kaneshiro, Steven Hodson and producer Art Lindsey joined me to talk about what it is we missed over the last couple of weeks.  In our absence, the L33t Tech Reddit filter was a little sparse, so we tried to hit the highlight memes from the last few weeks.

The show topics covered a range of topics which included Dave Winer as a potential CTO of the US, Netflix going down on its customers, the Air Force’s closure of its Cyber Warfare Division, and when we were done with that, we got to a really heavy subject: manga avatars.

Grab the MP3 or play with the embedded player below.

Get the Elite Tech News podcast here
Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating)

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I just got a quick note from FriendFeed’s Bret Taylor letting me know that the FriendFeed Beta that MG Siegler spotted the other day is officially out and ready for public consumption. The new look sports a number of new features, all of which will end up getting integrated into the default design once feedback is garnered from the userbase.

There are a lot of interesting aspects to the new layout, most of which have to do with the organization of the data into different and user-defined groups, something that partially answers an issue I brought up with FriendFeed over the weekend.

In new functionality, though, there’s the ability to upload photos with new posts to the system, allowing you to select and upload multiple files at once with no additional downloads required (just using the standard share button that’s on every page).

Probably the most useful feature in this update is the ability to define friend lists. They’re designed to enable you to organize your friends into groups.  This has long been a feature requested for services like FriendFeed and Twitter - the noise level that rises with adding new friends can interfere with the reliable communication you may have had with your close friends when you first set up your service.  Despite the trademark spartan design on FriendFeed, keeping up with hundreds of folks is surprisingly easy, but in doing so, you’ll probably notice as I did the decrease in intimacy with your core friends.

The friends lists can help remedy this, and by setting up the groups, you’ll more easily be able to scan through and get a handle on what your buddies have been up to before heading on over to the white noise that is the combined feeds of all the people you’re following.

If your goal is more noise, rather than less, you’ll probably enjoy the newfound ability to see other people’s home feeds. This can be useful for when you want to explore others’ circles of friends and assimilate them into your own collective, as you’ll be able to see your current friend’s postings in the context of all their friend’s postings.

I haven’t had long to test these features yet, but at first blush, I’d say I’m all for them. They potentially solve a lot of issues I was developing with the service, so I expect them to be widely well recieved.

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Even though social network hi5 has had support for Widgetbox widgets since early July, the ability for developers to fully leverage hi5 as a network in relation to these widgets was limited to the capabilities of, well, a widget. Now, Widgetbox has teamed up with hi5 to allow access to its App Gallery for an integrated solution that allows apps built on Widgetbox to act as stand-alone applications within the hi5 network.

According to hi5, over 2 million Widgetbox widgets have been added to hi5 from its existing support, leading to more than 65,000 subscriptions to widgets. Now, any developers that would like to create an application for hi5 now have the option of creating an OpenSocial application that’s distributed on Widgetbox and through hi5 and all the other of the other social networks that have launched OpenSocial support.

This is yet another way in which developers can take extend their distribution, expanding on Widgetbox’s existing support for other platforms like Facebook as well. It allows hi5 to provide more value to its developer community, and allows Widgetbox to provide more channels through which its Application Gallery creations can be accessed. Given Widgetbox’s developments for its own advertising networks, making deals with large social networks will benefit Widgetbox and its advertisers and developers as well.

As hi5 was also among the first to support OpenSocial, and took things a step further with its own messaging API, there are a number of hi5-specific ways in which developers can further gain adoption for their applications. Got an app through Widgetbox on hi5? Let us know what you think of this new partnership.

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In the United States, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions are upon us and the presidential race is moving into full gear. There are a number of websites devoted to helping you follow news from each of these events, your presidential candidate of choice, and more. You can even follow it all from the comfort of Facebook. Here are 20 resources to help you keep track of the 2008 political conventions.

How are you following the conventions? Tell us more in the comments.

Coverage

ABCNews.com - ABC will be providing live streaming coverage as well as some behind-the-scenes videos of what is going on at the convention.

BigTentDenver.org - Google and Digg are two of the sponsors for The Big Tent, an 8,000 square foot, two story facility at both conventions for bloggers.  The blogger haven will provide food, data access, YouTube uploading, massage areas and even places to nap.

CBSNews.com - CBS News anchor Katie Couric will be hosting Web-exclusive news specials on both CBSNews.com and CNet.com during both of the conventions.  You can read more about the plans in a piece here on Mashable by  Don Reisinger, CBS to Offer First Online Stream of Political Convention Coverage.

CNN - CNN’s live streaming site will be carrying live coverage throughout the conventions.

ShadowTV.com - ShadowTV will be providing the streaming video tools for the Republican convention to gather all of the various news feeds into one centralized location.  You can read more about this in Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins piece, Republicans Choose ShadowTV for RNC Streaming (Who?).

Stickam.com - Stickcam will be streaming from both conventions from 9 AM ET / 6 AM PDT for The Chris Plante Show each day of the events.

UStream.tv - UStream will be providing the live video streaming for the Republican convention in Minneapolis.

Washington Post and Newsweek - These two well-known publications are teaming up to show live streaming coverage of the conventions.

YouTube 2008 Conventions - YouTube has pages for both political conventions with coverage including even the building of the stages and more.

Facebook

Barack Obama Fan Page - Become a fan of the Democratic nominee and learn a little bit more about him.

Democratic Convention 2008 Fan Page - Doesn’t seem to have as many bells and whistles as the Republican fan page, but still an easy way to show your support.

GOP Convention 2008 Fan Page - Become a fan of the 2008 Republican convention and follow all of the action from the comfort of your Facebook profile.

John McCain Fan Page - The official page for John McCain’s efforts on the popular social network.

Students For Barack Obama - As the name would imply, this fan page is specifically for students that support the Democratic nominee.

Democrats

BarackObama.com - The presumptive Democratic candidate for the Republican party in the 2008 Presidential election.

DemConvention.com - Official site of the Democratic National Convention that will be held in Denver, CO August 25th - 28th.

Democrats.org - The official website of the national Democratic party.

Republicans

GOP.com - Official website of the national Republican party.

GOPConvention.com - The 2008 Republican National Convention will be held September 1st - 4th in Minneapolis, MN.

JohnMcCain.com - The presumptive Republican candidate for the Republican party in the 2008 Presidential election.

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MicasaStyle is a social network for home owners and interior design aficionados who like to share information about their personal taste. Emerging from its beta test period this week, the idea behind MicasaStyle is to create a space that inspires others when it’s time to decorate their homes, along the same lines as other networks like Curbly.

This happens through a series of users that take the time to share images of their space and tag items in these photos. Think of the Facebook image-tagging capability that allows you to outline additional details in a given photo, providing viewers more data to work with beyond the actual image itself. In fact, MicasaStyle likens its service to a Facebook for room interiors, and its photo-tagging feature is central to its overall service offerings.

There’s a rather involved upload and tagging process that you go through in order to share images of your own space, layering in additional information like the budget of the room, what type of room you’re sharing, and descriptive tag words that will help others find your space. And since MicasaStyle is so apt to become like a Facebook for home owners, I’d actually love to see some image import options from existing photo albums across the Web, like Facebook and Flickr, so that this sharing process can be simplified a bit for users.

One good thing about the tagging process on MicasaStyle is the fact that retailers you add to your shared space will be auto-completed by MicasaStyle, providing links to that retailer so others can visit their site. What’s missing from this particular portion of the sharing process is the ability to add in a retailer’s link on your own, so if a particular retailer isn’t in MicasaStyle’s database yet, there won’t be a link readily available for other users. Additionally, links created by MicasaStyle’s auto-completion feature redirect to the retailer’s main website, not the page with details on the particular object that’s been tagged.

Having a bookmarking tool for MicasaStyle users could help with specific information-sharing on this end, but it would also veer away from the room-specific way in which personal taste is shared on MicasaStyle’s network. To this end, I’d say that the approach MicasaStyle is taking with this site is very niche, as it limits its users to share photos from their own homes, and relies on a pretty good memory for a home owner, based on price, retailer and retailer information for any given piece on their home.

I know that many home owners do in fact remember most of the information about the pieces in their home, but converting all of that into a cohesive, heavily-tagged network for sharing inspiration is a time commitment for participating users, and MicasaStyle would do well to diversify the type of users it attracts as it moves forward.

Most Twitter and blog integration tools aggregate all tweets to a blog and post them exactly as they are, verbatim, which can produce less than desirable results. TweetRemote is a new open source way to integrate Twitter with blogging platforms that aims to give bloggers more control over this process. You can pick and choose which tweets to publish to your blog and how they will look. It accomplishes this by only posting relevant tweets and formats them in a blog-friendly format.

How does it do that?

TweetRemote is able to do this by recognizing hashtags in tweets such as #text, #link, and #image, then pulls those tweets into separate RSS-style feeds and then formats them accordingly. Thus, everything appears on your blog in a more aesthetically pleasing format. The other key ingredient is the use of an RSS aggregator of choice such as FeedWordPress. Here’s the full installation documentation.

At what cost?

There might be a small price to pay for this benefit. In order to make your blog prettier it requires making your twitter stream a little uglier. For example, if you wanted to send a nicely formatted hyperlink to your blog via twitter with TweetRemote then you would have to send the following tweet: #link http://tweetremote.com Cool new twitter/blog integration tool! While the end result will look good on your blog, you might lose some followers on twitter because of what some call Tweet stream pollution. Quite simply, there are many people on Twitter that just don’t like hashtags and the way they look. So, it’s your decision if it’s worth potentially losing a few followers or not.

Conclusion

TweetRemote is intended only for bloggers that host their own blogs because it requires uploading files and some manual configuration. That means bloggers on free services like Worldpress.com and Blogger are out of luck at this point in time. Still, even if TweetRemote doesn’t accomplish this in the easiest manner, it has developed a better mousetrap for this process. Ultimately, that’s a good sign for things to come for anyone that wants to integrate Twitter with their blog.

There has been a lot of brouhaha over Ma.gnolia going open source and I’m not sure most of it is justified. There are certainly features that work to Ma.gnolia’s advantage, but even though embracing open source and data portability (among other features) improve the service, they are unlikely to make it competitive.

Not only is Ma.gnolia minuscule compared to Yahoo’s Delicious (recently relaunched to version 2.0), but compared to Yahoo’s Buzz and Digg, even Delicious itself is minuscule and that’s not about to change.

The times, they’re a-changin’

The launch of Yahoo’s Buzz was a somewhat controversial move on the company’s part. First, many thought that it would cannibalize the Delicious user base (which I’m now sure it will to an extent), second, it launched with an incredibly exclusive beta and several severe limitations in social capabilities (most of which still exist today), and third, it was yet another large corporation taking a shot at the house that Digg built.

Regardless, it was also a brilliant move and not just for the reasons I’ve mentioned before. Traffic figures and user acceptance have been excellent, (already surpassing Digg by some measures), and recent reviews have been generally positive. Apart from displaying Yahoo’s ability to enter and dominate a space within a matter of months, it also shows that they understand the changing landscape of the social bookmarking space.

Even after the launch of delicious 2.0, the service no longer grips the imagination (or even fleeting fascination) of the digerati, who have already moved on from social bookmarking to social news and networking, and perhaps the launch of Yahoo Buzz in advance of the Delicious relaunch was Yahoo’s way of hedging its bets.

All that is to say that bookmarking as a social activity is soon to become a thing of the past. In fact there is already interest in non-social bookmarking with services like Instapaper (my personal favorite) popping up everywhere you turn. As people move away from the rather passive activity of sharing bookmarks to actively participating in the submission, promotion, and propagation of news and networking on the basis of their interests, social news and networking sites are bound to replace bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia and Delicious.

The only reason to make bookmarking social was so that you could find new sites from people that share interests or activities with you. StumbleUpon has done such a par excellence job of doing exactly that, it further diminishes the importance of sharing bookmarks in the traditional sense.

But that’s not all

Even if there was hope for the social bookmarking space, there are several other points to consider.

- Open source without a willing community means nothing. Developers, developers, developers! Going open source allows people freely to interact with and build for/on your platform, but you need people who want to do this, for it to be fruitful.

- Social news and networking is already open source. We’ve had pligg for a very long time now, plus there is Meneame and more recently Reddit has also gone open source.

- Just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. You don’t have to look much farther than mixx to realize that you can do everything right, have all the right partnerships in place, and still not get the following you deserve. Success rarely comes easy and almost never overnight.

While Ma.gnolia’s efforts are commendable they don’t predict a very bright future for the site and the ongoing decline in use and impending obsolescence of social ‘bookmarking’ is partly to blame.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: YadaHome

20 word description: YadaHome.com, is a full-service, ad-supported social network designed to help parents organize their busy lives and connect with friends, family and peers.

CEO’s Pitch: We designed YadaHome.com to bridge the gap between generic social networks and organizational utilities (calendar, lists, etc.). Our site offers a complete social networking experience for parents, including discussion forums and user groups. What makes us unique is our trademarked user-profile, “The Fridge,” which combines a familiar interface with the type of applications busy moms and dads need.

Like the home fridge, ours comes with stocked grocery lists, to do lists, calendars, photos, a journal, a cookbook and a messaging center. We even offer a virtual family dog to keep members company online. We are a member-first network and are laser-focused on serving our target market. We have attracted over 2,500 member, mostly moms, since our May 12th launch and are attracted between 50 and 100 members daily.

Mashable’s Take: In the real world, you could say that the physical “start page” for parents is the kitchen fridge. It’s got your take out menus stuck under your dentist’s swag magnet, anniversary party invitations, fliers for next week’s concert at the park, the grocery list and the extracurricular activity schedules of everyone in the household. It’s not the most organized way of keeping track of your household, but it’s centralized so everyone knows where everything is.

A new site called YadaHome is looking to transfer all of this to its Web-based service, and it even stays with the fridge analogy. This new start page for parents reminds me a lot of a Yahoo or iGoogle start page in that it aggregates much of your existing activity and information that’s important to you, such as the weather and items you’ve got upcoming on your calendar. From there, YadaHome also recommends events in the area, and recipes you may want to test out for yourself.

Of course, a recipe box is nicely tied in with grocery lists, and events are nicely tied in with the need for babysitters, so the result of all this site activity can often boil down to a need for highly localized search in your area. Unfortunately YadaHome hasn’t dug down into the localized search potential of its site–there’s not even a general search tab anywhere to be found. Most of the recommendations and services (like local events, freebies, and coupons) are offered through a third-party service and aren’t directly integrated into your YadaHome start page.

I think that a more integrated approach to this niche start page for parents would be very helpful, so that YadaHome could move towards the personal assistant side of Web-based services, and become even more of a hub for its users. That means local search, more powerful recommendations, direct integration with third-party services (i.e. babysitter recommendation and scheduling sites), and even some import/export capabilities.

Going along with the fridge representation of one’s life, YadaHome also offers the capability of posting photos on your virtual fridge, so having a Flickr import option here would be an easy way for users to share their photo stream with other users. Because in the end, YadaHome is also a place where users can share their recipes, blog entries, and experiences with others, via forums, discussion boards, etc. So by layering in more integral ways in which users can access local information from other users and other services, YadaHome can provide more value.