Musicology

Prince has opened its own music store within his website. I guess this is a trend that every artist will follow: sell your own music on your own website. Maybe they get a higher cut when they sell it themselves. There will still remain however a need for an aggregation service. I am not going along all the artist websites to find the music I want. But such an aggregation service can be limited to search itself. The buying and downloading can be done on the artist site, Anybody creating such an enabling service for artists?

By the way, Prince sells his music in WMA-format, which is a no-go on my platform.

[inspiration Betalogue]

Google’s Future

I just read Jason Kottke’s comment on Google’s Future. He sees Google as the giant operating system of the future, where everybody in the world has an account. And Google knows all the things you are doing with this account. This latter part reminds me very much of the goal of entry portals. They were supposed to sell this information in some form to commerce related companies. And in the end everybody just uses Google as their PC with light weight clients (where did I hear that before?).

We’ll see. To many predictions went wrong.

TuneCircles

Meeting Friends based on your music. That seems like a good idea. So I did sign up right away. At first the service does need to know what music you like (they should look at my Amazon profile). For this you can point to your MP3-file directory. Unfortunately I can not access the files on my iPod (where all my music is), so I have to find another way to get the services started. I did find some MP3-files in my archive, but TuneCircle is not able to update the library. It does find the MP3-files, but after that it seems to fail. So I have to wait a while before I can try out this service.

[inspiration Michiel Frackers]

StumbleUpon

Gerrit Visser asked me to look at this service: StumbleUpon. The first impression is that it is just a way to save your bookmarks, so that other people can see them. Nice, but I rather do that on my own site. However they also seem to give suggestions based on your interest. That makes it an advanced search service based on your complex personal profile (rated bookmarks). Which reminds me of the Alexa toolbar. In order to try it out on my Mac, I had to download a special browser: Firefox. Using Firefox will add a toolbar. This toolbar can be used to stumble along websites. Each website can be rated: like or dislike. It is not clear how sites are suggested. ANd finally, the system does not allow you to save bookmarks. First impression was wrong.

The service knows groups. Each user can belong to a group. Clicking on the group link, will present an overview of the group members with pictures and the related links. It is not clear to me what the related links present. Are they common links? Each group seems also to be related to other groups, but it is unclear how this is done.

Will I use this service however? No, I did some stumbling and there were to few interesting sites. That makes it to time consuming. I stick with my other method for stumbling: reading RSS-feeds.

Lockergnome blog-hosting

I am not sure whether this is new or not, but Lockergnome allows you to create a blog with a lockergnome URL on Blogware. On his domain you can register, but for the management of the blog, you user the Blogware-interface.

Has he become a reseller? This might be an interesting enabling service, i.e. allowing other users to start a blog with your domain name.

[inspiration Social Software Weblog]

Tune-watch

This site did some useful things with the RSS-feeds of the iTunes MusicStore. It transformed them to a website. The site presents all kind of listings of the sales in the store: what are the most popular albums? the latest releases? the best folk songs? etc. Clicking on a song brings you to the music store.

I guess Apple should have done this. It is a music search service for the iTunes Music Store.

[inspiration MacCentral]

GlobalSpec

John Battelle has an interesting entry on GlobalSpec. GlobalSpec is a search service for engineering related equipment and parts. The interesting thing is that they added a lot of metadata information to each resource. This allowed them to supply complex search services to their customers. Indeed an interesting example of what the semantic web could be like.

NewsMap - News visualisation

Always interesting to se someone thinking of new inetrefaces. NewsMap presents the news headlines in the form of a map. Each headline fills a rectangle. The size of the rectangle depends on the number of related news-reports behind it. The colour of the rectangle depends of the recency. The news is categorized into seven categories, each with its own colour. It is also possible to select one of the ten countries and get only news from related sources. Moving over and clicking on a rectangle presents one of the corresponding newsitems.

Is this however useful. The nice thing is to see, which news item is een as important. Minor items seem to fall of the list or are not readible. The world news category showed some 17 items, when I looked. This is not much and it much easier to scan in a simple listing.

[inspiration BoingBoing]

Webjay

Jon Udell laments the loss of Napster, because he no longer can find interesting music. The basis for ideas to new music should be based on your presonal taste: your playlist. WebJay makes a first step in this direction. On this site user can publish their playlist. Each playlist consists of the song name and a link to a public available MP3-file.

Although this is interesting in itself, I see it as a minor first step to a good recommendation service. A playlist could be published in an appropriate RSS-format and then aggregated by a service, which then offers suggestions on your or somebody else’s playlist. My music interest should not stay locked up within Amazon.

PTT

I am not sure that I understand PTT. As I get it it, it is like the walky-talky that my kid uses. It is always on and so you are always (ready) listening to the other side. Something gets send if you push the talk-button, hence PTT. However when nobody is senden nothing has to happen on the network. It reminds me of Instant Messaging, where you always listen in to the other side and where the sender has to do some explicit action. The question remains why people use a walky-talky. I guess the main reason is (was), better coverage than mobile. But if the coverage is equal, is there still a reason to use a walky-talky? Instant connection could be a reason, but this could be handled reasonably with a mobile (speed dial and automatic answer). However with a mobile data network it will be even easier. You can have a two way and always open voice connection (ambient sound). And not just when people push a button.

So why do people want PTT?

{inspiration Eric Lin @ The Feature]