After nearly three years of blogging, I’m beginning to appreciate one of the ways it keeps you honest: your past projections and predictions are still there to haunt you when (to mix metaphors) the chickens come home to roost. I don’t think what I wrote about ‘martini media’ one or two years ago was wrong […]
Month: April 2006
Neil Young: Living With War
[Click the image to hear Neil Young’s new album in full.] Even if I didn’t like all the results when Neil Young first donned a vocoder and got a synthesiser in 01982, when he put out a rockabilly album months later, followed by a country album, and so on, I liked the fact that he […]
Virtual listening sessions with your buddies
For years it’s been common for people posting to music-related email lists and forums to sign-off with a note saying “now playing” (abbreviated to “np”) followed by the title of the album they had on while composing the message. It’s a way of adding a personal touch, disclosing a bit more of your musical identity, […]
Update on playlist services
In preparing the White Bicycles playlist yesterday, I revisited a subset of the playlist services that I reviewed last year and in January. Here are some notes on what’s changed, plus some notes on different contexts for searching for tracks.
Review of White Bicycles by Joe Boyd
In the April issue of Prospect, Philip Oltermann observes a trend he calls the network biography, focusing more on artists’ social networking to gain influence, and less on individual talent and its fruits. Along with this, “anecdotes have become more than mere padding”, he claims, and have moved to centre stage in biographical accounts. Joe […]
Visualisation of music collections
The picture on the left is an annotated version of a possible visualisation of someone’s music collection, as proposed and described in a research paper available from Musicstrands. The segments in the circle represent different genres of music within the collection; the distance of each track (represented by dots) from the centre shows how old […]
blog.ac.uk: educational use of weblogs
On 2 June I’ll be participating in the blog.ac.uk one-day conference on educational use of weblogs and weblogging software. It’s in London at Living Space, and is free to attend. There’s an embryonic web site for the event, which will develop over the next six weeks. My involvement comes through a connection with Josie Fraser, […]
Copyright infringement in shared playlists: don’t blame the carrier?
When I created a playlist on Webjay last year, I noted the varying legal statuses of the recordings I included — from public domain to creative commons to promotional ‘giveaway’ — including one I deleted when I knew it was not authorised and had read Webjay’s legal guidance. This Reuters article seems aimed at stirring […]
Music recommendation data spread about
Having written last month about Pandora apparently opening up, and having drawn comparisons with Last.fm, two music services have licensed some of the Last.fm data to add recommendations to their sites. Download store and magazine site TuneTribe.com is perhaps the less interesting example. Their home page now has a search facility “powered by Last.fm”. Provided […]