Webjay

Webjay was a web-based playlist service launched in early 2004. Playlists consisted of links to Vorbis, MP3, WMA, RealAudio and/or other audio files on the web. Webjay users could create new playlists by copying from existing playlists, or by web scraping audio file links from external web pages or playlists. The site was created by Lucas Gonze.

Yahoo! announced its acquisition of Webjay on January 9, 2006. It closed down the Webjay site at the end of June, 2007.

Web scraping portions of Webjay were incorporated into the Yahoo! products Yahoo! Media Player and Easy Listener.

The Webjay logo was created by Perri Harper.

Although Webjay did not host any files, it made an effort to avoid potential copyright disputes by removing links upon request of the content or host owner. The site's copyright policy included this statement:

Even though we won't censor users, we would be grateful if users would censor themselves. Webjay exists to promote music which has been authorized for distribution on the web, not to make it easier to find unauthorized music. Please do not post links to unauthorized music. It will bring trouble. It will promote hoarded music at the expense of music libre. It will be stupid -- posting hoarded music on the web is a really bad idea.

A July 15, 2004 story in The New York Times titled "Multimedia Scrapbooks to Share" described the site this way:

A handful of Web users are programming their own virtual TV newscasts and eclectic collections of video clips using a free media-sharing tool called Webjay (www.webjay.org). The site makes it easy to build, share and watch playlists of audio and video links culled from around the Internet.

A March 30, 2004 story in Jon Udell's blog titled "Blogs + playlists = collaborative listening" described the site this way:

There are a bunch of things that frustrate me about playlists. Competing formats: m3u, smil. Inconsistent behavior: if you want your tunes (and associated images) to render as you expect, you're looking at an insane test matrix. Crappy metadata: missing or incomplete, and often hard to find. Despite all these irritations I find myself returning to Webjay for the same reasons I write this blog and read others. What I know, I want to share with others. What others know, I want to know too.

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