I'm currently listening to some Soundgarden - a few years old, but great music. It's the former band of the lead singer from Audioslave, Chris Cornell (he also went solo for one of the James Bond themes). Anyway, that's how bored I am, I have to wrtie about what I'm listening to.

Went to a wedding yesterday, which was alright. Not many people I knew but it was still fun, even if it did rain. Constantly. But hey, that's the Scottish weather for you.

Still haven't seen Toms Hitler cat. I really want to, so I'll try and post pics when I do finally manage to see it:)

Oh, and I just bought myself a gamecube for some retro gaming - Nintendo style! Kind of an impulse buy, and got loads of games. Too many probably. Infact no, you can't have too many games. EVER. Also got a gameboy advance for some pokemon, I love that game :)

Anyway, I can't be arsed wrighting anymore, because I am so tired. I'll add more in another post, but for now I'm going.

Oh, if you have last.fm add me at www.last.fm/user/neillya1

That MSN conversation with Tom and Nikki is calling me with it's flashing icon at the bottom of my screen. Should really go and see what the idoit and the bassist are up to I guess.

I'll leave you with a completely random and unrelated picture today, because I can't think what to put.

Who ever said blashphemy wasn't fun?

My "rant" today is about relevance, which I define as targeting your app or service to work within the context of your consumer. Many internet-businesses focus on two things: building easy connections to other web-users and trying to prevent total breakdown when viral growth reaches a peak.

The fallacy in that mindset is that users are being treated like nodes, who connect back or connect to other users. A node, in a P2P network, is a static entity, one that doesn't move. A user is, typically, a human being, one that not only moves, but exists on a different plane, the physical world. A lot of web-businesses fail to make that distinction and it has created not only the reality that we are being bombarded with connections whenever we sit at our PC, but we are expected to be connected 24/7.

I alluded to this last year, when I asked "what place does the web take?" The point of that article was really about the relevance of the web to real life. According to a theory, there are three places relevant to people: the first place, which is home-life, the second, which is work-life, and the third, which is leisure. The web, through email, blogs, work-apps, twitter, media, has become a hub in all three places, but its consequences are both information overload and obesity, both caused by passivity.

When you look up the word "break," it's defined as "a period of time taken out of one's professional activity in order to do something else." If the web is work and the web is home, then the break should not be the web.

Relevance is, once again, having services be context-driven, i.e. being relevant or shutting up at the right time and the right place and for the right person. A pretty complex task, but that is an ideal to live for.

Let me give some examples. Both TheFilter and Last.fm are services that both passively monitor media-life and actively provide services (such as radio-stations and the like). When I plug in my iPod after a run (a third place-activity), Last.fm asks me whether I want to "Scrobble" my tracks, which it in turn uses to make recommendations. TheFilter is not quite there yet, but it passively scans my iTunes-behaviour and creates custom-playlists for me if I want. You may think this is no big deal, but you'd be surprised how few services make even that tiny step from the web to the desktop.

A bigger deal, in my opinion, is NearByNow, which allows shoppers to search the shopping-malls that they visit, not by searching every store, but by entering a search-term for a product on their mobile or via the web, and having it search the retailers' inventory. I wrote about it here before. This is just a first step, but especially in retail there's much room still for merging the web with the shop.

Some more examples are the Nintendo Wii, which brings a physical dimension to gaming, and even the MacBook Air and the Asus EEE, both of which are clearly designed to not chain users to a location.

Relevance is something that a lot of commercial and non-commercial services are battling with nowadays. How do you sell a good online that you need to smell, taste, feel, or try on? How do you integrate virtual friendships into real life? How do you limit the amount of noise that your online customers are exposed to? How do you "synergise" the power of the web—information at a finger-tip—with a fragmented physical world? How do you create business models based on both the online and offline behaviour of consumers?

Those are the real questions to answer, not only for the web to become truly mainstream, but for it to stop treating us "users" like grey square boxes with a blue light shining out of it. We, the kids, the workers, the retired, are people dammit, with muscles (not just in the fingers), mouths, and other senses. We were not put on this planet to read 12/7 and type the other 12.

The next liberation-age is, I hope, about freeing ourselves from the machines and living life again as the hybrid entities that we are, producing both physical and mental energy.

Rant over.

Vincent

(The picture is the cover of the book "Snow Crash"—still the most relevant book about a very possible future of the information age today… if you ask me.)

so prakash introduced me to this awesome brother-sister duo called Julia and Angus Stone. So I played them on last.fm and I found this other gem. Gotye's Heart's a Mess. Check out the eerie video and haunting music. Been on loop on my iPod for a bit. Also Angus and Julia Stone's Just A Boy. Lovely song.

P.S Can't seem to embed the youtube code. So the links instead.
Just A Boy

Heart's A Mess

Questo post potrei etichettarlo nella categoria "cose che non mi piacciono". Ma poi ognuno fa come gli pare.

Pero el problema es que nos cuesta mucho salir de las 40 canciones del momento por ello me encanta Last.fm, porque tiene de todo y siempre, siempre descubres algún tema, algún grupo que te llama más la atención.

Creo que el funcionamiento de Last es de sobra conocido por todos, pero para los que aún no lo conozcan os cuento, en la página o en el widget para el escritorio, introduces el nombre de un artista o un tipo de música que te apetezca escuchar, Last.fm lo encuentra y comienza la reproducción de una cancion del artista y cuando ésta acaba comienza a sonar otra que ha sido clasificada como similar a la anterior y asi hasta el infinito

Y si a este genial servicio online, le añadimos otras páginas de calidad musical sobrada como mondosonoro o Hipersonica obtenemos una dupla perfecta para escuchar, descubrir y disfrutar de buena musica.

Si no teneis una cuenta creadla ya porque Last tiene mucho que ofrecer, haced la prueba, buscad cualquier tipo de musica o grupo y disfrutad con las coincidencias.

2.  Got my endosement for a well-deserved promotion to the next higher rank.  Still a long way to go, of course, from having to wear three flowers on the shoulder board, but at least, it's a start.  Unlike my two flowers which took nealy five years to covet, thanks to good-intentioned people who are surnamed "a-hole".

3.  Got my new Western Digital My Book Studio Edition (yeah, that long) external hard drive working nary a sweat.  Just plugged it in via Firewire and clicked Time Machine and it's back to watching Cliffhanger.  So easy, unlike the bastards who talk you into three debilitating hours explaining why I couldn't use a Time Capsule as an external hdd option only.

4.  Last.fm is the best internet streaming radio site ever.  Period.

5.  I am going to prune my trees and plants on Saturday.  Then I am going to sleep in the afternoon.  Then I am going to eat that "two-piece Chicken McDo with rice" just to spite myself.  Period.

Happy weekend.

Zaczyna się od pięknego przykładu, jak można zrobić coś ciekawego przy użyciu śpiewu gardłowego. W realu śpiew gardłowy słyszałem dotąd trzy razy, za każdym razem na Monciaku w Sopocie, gdzie przyjeżdżała jakaś grupa artystyczna ze Wschodu, widocznie w ten sposób da się zarobić. Różne rzeczy da się w ten sposób zaśpiewać, najwyraźniej jedną z nich jest "Rape Me" Nirvany - oto wersja pana o pseudonimie (?) Bugotak.

Świeżutka niczym bułeczki informacja pokazuje zaś, że w Tczewie 23 sierpnia wystąpi Cool Kids Of Death. Będzie to miało miejsce w ramach corocznego Festiwalu Grzegorza Ciechowskiego, gdzie występują raczej młode i mało znane zespoły, ale zawsze ktoś jest zapraszany jako gwiazda, w tym wypadku jest to CKOD. Jeśli o nich chodzi, przy okazji znalazłem ciekawy filmik z rozdania Yachów:

Jeśli ktoś po obejrzeniu nie wie, o co chodzi (a to całkiem możliwe), polecam zwrócenie uwagi na parę szczegółów. Pierwsza rzecz, warto obejrzeć jakiś inne ich nagranie, i zobaczyć, kto gdzie gra/śpiewa. Druga rzecz - gesty, ekspresja, czasem ułożenie palców na progach ;] Całkiem ciekawa reakcja na konieczność gry z playbacku.

Wracając do Festiwalu Ciechowskiego, na lastfm jest całkiem sporo zespołów, które mają tam grać. W dużej części nic ciekawego, ale zaciekawił mnie zespół pornohagen, który ma coś w sobie.

Link-uri:

http://beta.last.fm/group/Last.fm+Beta

asa arata un profil pe beta: http://beta.last.fm/user/nilarimogard

Take your top 20 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score.

If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference.

You can compute your own score here

My eclectic score is currently

94/100

The 94 related artists for my profile are:

• Aesop Rock
• Alicia Keys
• Amy Winehouse
• Architecture in Helsinki
• Belle and Sebastian
• Bobby Womack
• Bonde do Role
• Bootsy Collins
• Brian Eno
• Broadcast
• Bryan Ferry
• Cabaret Voltaire
• Clancy Eccles
• Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
• Common
• Curtis Mayfield
• David Bowie
• Derrick Morgan
• Don Drummond (aka Prince Buster)
• Duran Duran
• Dälek
• El-P
• Electronic
• Erasure
• Everything but the Girl
• Fatboy Slim
• Franz Ferdinand
• Funkadelic
• George Clinton
• George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic
• Goldfrapp
• Groove Armada
• Gwen Stefani
• Hi-Tek
• Iggy Pop
• Isaac Hayes
• James Dean Bradfield
• Japan
• Joss Stone
• Junior Senior
• Kaiser Chiefs
• Kanye West
• Kate Nash
• Klaxons
• Kylie Minogue
• Laurel Aitken
• Lily Allen
• Lou Reed
• Lush
• Madonna
• Magazine
• Mansun
• Mika
• Moloko
• Monade
• Mylo
• Nelly Furtado
• New Young Pony Club
• Nicky Wire
• Nine Inch Nails
• Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
• Parliament
• Peaches
• Pet Shop Boys
• Pulp
• Rhymefest
• Rilo Kiley
• Roy Ayers
• SHITDISCO
• Sage Francis
• Section 25
• Sophie Ellis-Bextor
• Stereolab
• Suede
• T. Rex
• Talib Kweli
• Talking Heads
• The Chemical Brothers
• The Concretes
• The Durutti Column
• The Ethiopians
• The Fiery Furnaces
• The Human League
• The Isley Brothers
• The Kooks
• The Libertines
• The Pipettes
• The Pop Group
• The Sea and Cake
• The Strokes
• The Velvet Underground
• Tilly and the Wall
• Tortoise
• Yo La Tengo

Music

*You can now stream Radiohead's In Rainbows for free on Last.fm. If you haven't already stolen it. Which you should have. [pop candy]

*The Wall Street Journal reports on how indie bands are best selling out today. I would recommend movie soundtracks or Gap commercials. But that's just me.

*The Wackness, a new movie featuring one of the tiny Olsens, is using a purple 90s mixtape as a promotional tool. And, apparently, that is enough to get a link from me? [complex]

*The fortune teller featured by Bruce Springsteen back in the day, Marie Costello, has died. [spinner]

*The 30 Most Adorable Album Covers: What, no little bee? Also, no Sugar Ray? (Hello?)

*The finest site I have run across in years: Men Who Look Like Zach Braff. This blog will change your life. [best week ever]

*Kinetic energy: The Sustainable Dance Floor. (Once again, covered this kind of thing for the day job back in the day.) [fresh creation]

*Shakira slowly moving toward deal with Live Nation? If you want to know how this will turn out, I recommend watching the hips. They don't lie.

*Very much off topic: Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded. As a gimmick, not (explicitly) for his bombast.

*Assorted: Happy birthday, little bro. Also: You would not believe how many people come to this blog searching for Rihanna naked. I don't know why.

A questo proposito c'e' da dire che da questo genere di siti non c'e' una vera e propria cancellazione di tutti i dati personali ma piu' che altro una disattivazione, un po' come avviene per Facebook, una pratica che puo' risultare leggermente fastidiosa, anche se comunque sono servizi che non fanno altro che aggregare dati gia' esistenti. Intanto son due giorni che cerco di cancellarmi da Plurk. Dov'e' finito il bottoncino DELETE?

P.S. Rileggendo mi sono accorto che e' un post piuttosto moscio.

The new API introduces a user authentication protocol which for the first time allows applications to create user sessions, bringing both read and write services to web apps, desktop apps and mobile devices.

Take our new tagging API’s. Developers can both pull and apply tags to music content from any application on any platform now. The same goes for sharing – developers can build Last.fm sharing support into any app.

There are also new search, playlist, event and geo API’s being rolled out today, with lots more stuff planned in the coming weeks and months.

At first glance, I noticed that there were a couple of key features (to me) were missing - namely the "Get Similar Tracks" - the Last.fm staff reminded me that they are planning to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months! OK, okay... I'll be more patient!

The new API feels and works like the Flickr API; with very similar convensions of the method/call names and authentication/token process.  This isn't a bad thing - just that I feel they should be leading the crowd, rather than following it.  (The beta version of the upcoming Last.fm site is being critisised for being a "facebook clone"!)

Regardless of my negative comments, I'm actually a fan of the new API - being more structured and scalable.  I'm considering writing a .NET wrapper library (C#) for it too!  As I've got plans for a small iTunes/Last.fm playlist app, that would require it; (all open-source, of course).

Since the new API follows similar Flickr API convensions, it seems to make sense that I could/should base my Last.fm .NET wrapper on it's Flickr counter-part.... Flickr.NET API.  The library is developed in a decent way - deserializing XML objects into the appropriate classes.  It feels a lot nicer to develop with, rather than messing around with XPath node selections!

Not sure when I'll get the time to develop the library, as my contract work is as busy as ever!! Hopefully things will calm down in a couple of weeks!

TobiBeescht is our 200th visitor at Last.fm. Hope to see you in September!

Immer wieder Verzögerungen von mehreren Tagen oder sogar Verlust der Titel. Wenn ich die (natürlich korrekten) Login-Daten mal wieder neu eingebe, kommt manchmal die Meldung, dass Benutzername und Passwort nicht stimmen. Was nicht sein kann, weil ich mich mit eben diesen Daten noch eine Minute vorher auf der Website anmelden konnte.

Jetzt habe ich mir also einen Ersatz gesucht. Gefunden habe ich Sonata als Frontend für mpd, mal sehen wie ich damit klarkomme.

Natürlich enthalten ist in Sonata die audioscrobbler-Unterstützung, das war ja das Hauptkriterium. Ebenfalls vorhanden ist eine Musikbibliothek. Das hatte audacious nicht, dafür habe ich mir eine eigene in php programmiert, Tag-basiert. Mal sehen, wie ich das jetzt umsetzen kann. Ich will ungern alles neu in mehrere Playlists einsortieren müssen. Ebenfalls besser: weniger CPU-Last, auch wenn das wohl kaum ins Gewicht fällt. Außerdem gefällt mir der Name des Players.

Zusatz: weil natürlich nur gescrobblet wird, wenn Sonata läuft, hab ich gleich noch scmpc installiert. Dieses Programm kann ebenfalls als Dämon laufen und die gespielten Titel an last.fm weiterleiten. Die Dokumentation ist etwas dürftig, aber immerhin ist ein init-Script dabei. So geht mir jetzt kein Titel mehr durch die Lappen.

Yet, those days have passed. In 2002, the world witnessed the birth of Last.fm, a free social music platform. Today, Last.fm is the world's largest free platform and the most effective tool used to out obscure other music fans and prove your alternative worthiness. This, possible though Last.fm's scrobble technology which "scrobbles" or documents each track you listen to automatically onto the website's data base.

However, even the coolest of us makes mistakes and thanks to users' ability to turn the Last.fm's scrobble feature on and off, that one time you listened to Rock Against Bush (Vol. 1 &2) non-stop never existed.

Surprisingly, the top unscrobbled artists (according to playground.last.fm) are The Beatles followed by Radiohead. These, behind "unknown" and before more obvious artists: Britney Spears and Avril Levigne.

Why are so many trying to hide their deep passionate love of The Beatles and Radiohead? Beats me.

God Is an Astronaut to irlandzki zespół grający instrumentalnego post-rocka. Ich cztery albumy można w całości posłuchać na Last.fm. Bardzo podobają mi się ich teledyski, które nadają utworą specyficzny klimat.

Nie mogę nie wspomnieć także o nowym albumie islandzkiego zespołu Sigur Rós, który na pewno wielu obił się choćby z nazwy o uszy. Album "með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust", bo o nim tu mowa można było za darmo posłuchać na last.fm do 23 czerwce. Była to akcja promocyjna. Słyszałem różne głosy o nim, mi się osobiście podoba.

החברה מ-Floola הוציאו גרסת בטא חדשה ל-Floola 3.0. החידוש העיקרי הוא תמיכה ביכולת אחסון התמונות בגרסאות החדשות של ipods.

בנוסף ישנם שיפורים בתמיכה ב-Last.FM, תיקוני באגים ושיפור ביצועים.

אם אתה לא מפחדים מגרסאות בטא ויודעים איך לשחזר ipod במידת הצורך ניתן להוריד בכתובת:

http://www.floola.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=663&start=0#forumpost2877

Paul Fuster,

The Beatles,

Eyes Adrift,

The Posies,

Natalia Lafourcade,

Gonzales,

The Police,

Blind Melon,

Charles Mingus,

lastfm.es/user/juanlogp/