This is one of a series of interviews I’m doing on the theme of Agile Learning. See also interviews on agile learning and agile technology, hands-on alternatives to factory learning, learner-generated contexts, home schooling, peer-to-peer learning in the enterprise and creating the School of Everything. Tony Hall takes photographs and makes photomovies. At the same […]
Music and Multimedia
University of Death by Sean McManus: A Review
There’s a pivotal scene in University of Death where the muso-technology geek at the heart of the story struggles to persuade the venal record industry boss to buy-in to a groundbreaking new scheme that will change the industry forever. To accomplish this, the geek plays the boss a new composition, which has been engineered to […]
The Age of the Free MP3 Player
This is the season where many bloggers are providing their predictions for the year ahead. I tend to opt out of these because a year is both too long and too short to foresee many types of change, which are like rainstorms or earthquakes: you know one’s coming, but you don’t know quite when or […]
Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll is published
My book is out in the UK. If you buy it from Amazon.co.uk, you’ll make me happy. If you can add to the reviews for the book, you’ll make me even happier. I believe the book is out imminently, if not already, in the US as well — based on the Amazon.com page, where you […]
Revisiting Subscription versus A-La-Carte models
The contention between subscription and à-la-carte models for online music has been running for at least five years, and I suspect it has at least another five years left to run. Rhapsody was the first to start offering a subscription service, where you pay a monthly fee in return for access to (but not permanent […]
Are the Creative Archive and remix culture being sidelined?
A few days ago the BBC announced plans to open up its archive of TV and radio programmes for on-demand access. Mention of the BBC’s recent Creative Archive initiative was notable by its absence. According to this latest announcement, Full-length programmes, as well as scripts and notes, will be available for download from the BBC’s […]
Last.fm makes personal radio stations easily shareable
I like this. In the new beta version of Last.fm, you can now share different playlists with others via an embedded Flash player, like this: That playlist is my ‘loved tracks’ on Last.fm, but you can also hear all the artists and tracks I’ve tagged as ‘french’ or those any of my other most frequently […]
BBC Music web resources updated and integrated
It’s been a long time (2.5 years) since I wrote much about the BBC’s online music resources. Though I still use these resources fairly frequently, I don’t always do so particularly attentively (if you know what I mean), so I don’t know if the changes I noticed today are very recent or months old. Previously […]
Soundflavor moves into music recommendation client software
Soundflavor is the latest playlist sharing service to move beyond just their sharing community (see my review) to offer a software download that plugs into iTunes to recommend playlists. The download is called Soundflavor DJ™, and you can download it here. I haven’t been able to try the software yet as it’s only available for […]
UK survey of digital music and discovery
I’m posting here a duplicate of something that first appeared on my Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll book blog, just as a reminder to regular readers that, if postings here appear to be thin on the ground, it’s worth checking there as well. What I’d like to do is provide an RSS feed for the two […]