Buy my first book!

Blimey. I’m just filling in a questionnaire for my publisher to help them with publicity for my new book. They ask me to list: “Books previously published (title, publisher, date of publication, cloth or paperback, ISBN, unit sales)”. As it happens, when I wrote my MA thesis at Sheffield Hallam University — Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity […]

Wikipedia to bifurcate?

Just last week I was writing (for my book), “No one is going to set up a new free wiki-based online encyclopaedia any time soon: there can be only one.” Now I’m considering whether I can edit that to say “No one is going to initiate from scratch a…” or should I just delete it […]

Information foraging theory

Foraging rabbit,copyright and cc-licensed by caro wanders by mistake. I came across information foraging theory via Jakob Neilsen, who described it as “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993”. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview, noting that “information seekers… use the same strategies as food foragers — informavores constantly make decisions […]

A clutch of future-gazing events to plug

First is the b.TWEEN 06 forum of future entertainment, coming at the end of this week (25 and 26 May) in Bradford. The programme covers pioneering cross-platform work that straddles art and commerce. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but I enjoed the 02002 event, and aim to be there next year. I will […]

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.

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 […]

Musicube sharing of BBC listening profiles

Through Radio 1, the BBC has introduced a Flash interface to its on-demand ‘listen again’ feature, which enables listeners both to personalise the user interface they use to access radio programmes, and to share this interface with their friends. My personal ‘musicube’ is shown below. The elements I got to specify are the genres included […]

Is the dust settling on podcasting?

Is it just me or are all the bubbles in the podcasting lather turning into a thin layer of slightly manky detergent on the surface of internet pond life? There was a spell last year, after iTunes first included podcast subscriptions, where the response to everything seemed to be “The solution is to start podcasting […]