Last weekend I was at the music hack day in London, organised by Dave Haynes and James Darling: a two-day event where software developers met up and wrote music-related software (or built hardware.) Instruments, a distributed content resolver, various SoundCloud tools, etc. Although the event attracted lots of interesting people from all over the planet (well, Europe) I ended up coding most of the weekend instead of talking. (On that note, I'm still amazed by the amount of time coding requires, even after you learned how to channel your ambitions more efficiently. Software development is still a painful process.) I …

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Over the past extended weekend I created Pool Radio, a tool that provides access to hopefully interesting Last.fm radio stations. See also the announcement in the Subscribers and their tag radio stations group forum, with some great comments by Nectar_Card. I'm aware that not a lot of people will find this site very useful, but people with an appreciation for the random and obscure can definitely benefit from it. Here are a couple of great user tag stations I've enjoyed over the last week: raw_u's etiopia tag radio (tag page), jirkanne's lllllllllllllll tag radio (tag page), JessiCoplin's scott storch tag …

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del.icio.us apparently has just added a feature that I've been wanting for a long time: It's now very easy to see the history of bookmarks for a specific URL without having to bookmark it yourself. Here's an example of such a bookmark history page: del.icio.us bookmarks for mailfeed.org. I regularly check these URL bookmark histories on del.icio.us, because it can answer all kinds of interesting questions, e.g.: How popular is this URL? Since when have people known about this? Who bookmarked this URL first? What are their comments? I imagine this caters to a small audience, but it's a …

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Query By Example by Meredith Patterson was one of this year's Google Summer of Code projects, and of all the projects I've looked at it seems the most exciting. Originally I wanted to wait for some more information about the project before writing about it, but as there weren't any news save some quiet early releases, and as I really need to clear my backlog of topics, I decided to have an early look. Query By Example sets out to get rid of a current limitation of relational databases: the lack of support for fuzzy searches. Here's the short project …

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CollaborativeRank is an interesting service that builds on the del.icio.us database. They provide bookmark search, a ranking of popular bookmarks, and they attempt to find connections between the things people store in their del.icio.us account and their area of expertise. It's the last feature that I find the most interesting. While it disguises as a ranking of users, its main promise is that it could help you find experts on arbitrary fields. During the last couple of weeks I've been watching my rank, and while I wouldn't necessarily agree with its estimation of my expertise it's still interesting to watch. …

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Just read in a comment by Esteban Kozak that SearchFox RSS uses both "attention and community data" when determining the value of an article, which means that some of the weird effects documented earlier might be a result of other people's behavior, as opposed to my own. To recapitulate: I'm trying to understand the algorithms behind SearchFox RSS's "Topics I Like" listing, and found that some terms are conspicuously high on the list where they don't really deserve to be (currently: "quake", "ning" -- see image below), and others that I care about more are nowhere to be found (currently: …

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I don't get it. Around the time I wrote about SearchFox RSS's "Topics I Like" feature I adjusted some of my reading habits (notably minimizing the consumption of web two-point-oh hype, and subscribing to more non-tech-oriented feeds), and the list of "topics I like" hasn't really adjusted to that. Maybe I'm too impatient, but I was presented with about 1.200 articles since last Wednesday and the list of "topics I like" seems rarely changed. I've included a screenshot of my current dataset below; I've also appended the words to the original data set. Note how e.g. "Ning" and "Quake" are …

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For the last two weeks I've observed SearchFox RSS's list of "Topics I like" to both find out how it's working and to see if it accurately reflects my taste. See my earlier article "SearchFox Rocks. But Where Are the Web Services?" for a little context. Random observations: The keywords are indeed ordered by rank, the first keyword being the most highly ranked. You can deduce this by comparing the keyword movements at the start and end of the list over time: lots of movement at the end of the list. Easy come, easy go. The list actually reflects what …

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On David Weinberger's blog: transcript of a talk and Q+A by Joshua Schachter of delicio.us. It's a bit sketchy, but has some interesting bits nevertheless. I was especially delighted by the discussion after Joshua introduces the upcoming "network" and "group" features, where groups are opt-in collaborations and networks more like the current inbox feature, in that users won't be told that you have included them in your network. Excerpt: I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip …

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SearchFox is really great. It's a web-based feed reader (currently in beta) that watches you reading feeds, and which uses this attention data to improve your reading experience. After you have used it for a while SearchFox develops an understanding of the things you care about, and presents these accordingly (feed articles are sorted by ranking, not time). How SearchFox works There are several ways to tell the application that you like a specific feed article: by reading the article (in SearchFox you are presented with a list of headlines and some metadata, and have to click a link to …

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I already gave a basic description of Pandora in my previous article, "Finally: An Alternative to Last.fm". Brief recapitulation: Pandora is a music streaming service that lets you control the kind of music that is played. You can define "stations" by bookmarking song titles or artist names, and the site then plays music that shares similar properties with your selected songs. In contrast to Last.fm, which is a social network, Pandora builds on a concept of rich metadata to find relationships between individual songs. This time I had the opportunity to actually use the system, so this should make an …

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Tom Conrad has apparently just presented "Pandora" at Bar Camp. Scoble quotes an email from Tom with a short description of the service: "Pandora is a "music discovery service" designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It works like this: you give us the name of an artist or song and we instantly create a "station" that plays songs that share musical characteristics with the artist/song you entered. From there you can fine-tune the station to your tastes by giving us feedback on the individual tracks we play. You can make up to 100 unique stations …

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While writing another bug report for Apple's OS X feedback page I used the dictionary popup to look up the word "noticeable" (I always forget if it is written with or without an "e"), and found not only that I had gotten it right this time, but also that Apple has added a very nice description of when to use this term and when others are more appropriate. I use the dictionary popup all the time, but I've never seen this type of content: an introduction to better English language usage. Very nice! Here's the text: noticeable adjective easily seen …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. I'm having a series of conversations with Falko Schmid about current interfaces to structured information, and about using existing web services to build all-encompassing information structure and search facilities. Our conversation started with the realization of a problem: apparently nobody can build a single system that integrates all information. There have been many attempts to accomplish that (Google and Wikipedia being the most prominent and successful) -- but if the last years have shown us anything it's that there is no way to define a stable content structure that …

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Normally I don't even glance at site ads, but while browsing Roger Ebert's site I saw a Google ad that made me stop and read. And reload. As if our democratized content mediation process wasn't confusing enough we now have Google ads that spread awareness of fraudulent business practices behind services advertised on other Google ads, and Google ads that look like they spread awareness of fraudulent business practices behind services advertised on other Google ads but in reality lead to fraudulent products. How bizarre: advertisers devalue the messenger (the Google ads medium) in an attempt to relativize a (probably …

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miniplayer is a minimal interface plugin for musikCube. it has basic player controls, a search field, it can access your playlists, there is a simple behavior-controlled suggestion mechanism (which is just a fancy way of saying "SQL query"), and a couple of small things that make life easier. I probably like the search field the most. type in a word and hit enter: the search result is sent to "now playing", and miniplayer immediately starts playback. instant gratification. if no songs are found the search field keeps focus, so you can correct your query and try again. I still have …

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"I Like This!" is a simple music recommendation plugin for the musikCube audio player. With this plugin musikCube users can recommend their favorite songs and net radio stations while they are playing in musikCube; all recommendations are then listed on this site. I's an easy way to share your musical taste with others, and to give others new ideas on what kind of music there is. It is also a proof-of-concept: an attempt to show how easy it is to develop a musikCube-plugin that uses xml-rpc to communicate with a remote computer. This opens up a whole space of new …

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