Here’s another Web-2.0-style tool for aggregating information and links. It’s the idea of Seth Godin, who has made his name from a series of books on innovative approaches to marketing in the age of the web. He sees this service, called Squidoo as a means for others to make their names in their areas of […]
Human-Computer Interaction
Peer-to-peer recommendations coming to mobile
Proving that convergence is rapidly becoming a fait accompli, news of personalised radio on mobiles is supplemented by peer-to-peer recommendations on mobile devices, currently in prototype development through the Push!Music project in Gothenburg. The site encourages you to Imagine that you have a mobile device that can store and play back music files, for example […]
Personalised radio moves to mobile
An unavoidable usability limitation of mobile phones is that you can’t create a small, multi-purpose user interface that is well-suited to all the tasks asked of it: text entry, information browsing, taking photographs, playing games and even making calls. That’s why a phone will never have the ease of use for music applications that the […]
Playlist portability: comparative review
One thing leads to another and, when we saw Barb Jungr play just before Christmas, I got a copy of her Every Grain of Sand album of Bob Dylan covers, which triggered another bout of my recurrent mania for these cover versions. I went through all my old covers albums again, ripped my favourite versions […]
MusicStrands: playlist sharing and music discovery
Last week MusicStrands launched a major upgrade that extends its scope by adding new ways to tag, discuss, and discover music — see the overview of the new features. This is moving in the direction of the MySpace music community — technically I think it’s a step ahead of MySpace, but clearly lacks the latter’s […]
Use case examples of Web 2.0
“This article may be confusing for some readers, and should be edited to enhance clarity.” That’s the editorial foreword at the top of Wikipedia’s entry for Web 2.0, an entry which says straight off, “a consensus upon [the term’s] exact meaning has not yet been reached” (all quotes as of the time of writing, but […]
More usability nightmares with DRM
Leaving aside the moral, legal or economic arguments about Digital Rights Management (DRM), how does it affect usability and the user experience? Last week a new form of DRM used by Sony BMG CDs came to light — though it has apparently been in use since March [source] — which installs a ‘rootkit’ on Windows-based […]
Browse interface for BBC Creative Archive clips
Last week the BBC made available the first video content under the terms of the Creative Archive initiative. The footage includes material covering natural history, wildlife, science, locations. I heard there was a hundred hours of footage, though it’s hard to check this; the clips appear to vary in length from under 30 seconds to […]
Aggregation of data across social networks
A few days ago Marc Canter sketched the idea of a technology to interconnect social networks together, via a post on the Pho list, and it caught my eye. “Instead of a giant centralized social network with 1,000,000 members, we’d prefer to see 1,000,000 social nets with 10-25-150 members each”, he wrote, referencing work done […]
Last word (for now) on playlist sharing
Having initially reviewed four playlist sharing services, three providers of further services have let me know of what they’re doing in this area. I’ve already posted addenda on FIQL and Mixmatcher. Here are some comments on the GoFish playlist service, and a consolidated comparison table.