nonsmokingarea.com

back from my 5day-trip to Barcelona, which rather feels like a 4week vacation regarding all the news that have happened last week. here my personal favorites:

• Jason Calacanis launches his infamous ‘Project X’ - Mahalo is a human-powered search-engine with editorial results aiming at the fat head rather than the long tail of search-queries. further insight on Mahalo in this video-interview of Jason by Loic Lemeur.
• Google releases Gears, a developer API similar to Dojo Offline. based on a browser-extension (currently Firefox & Internet Explorer only), Gears enables offline web-applications utilizing a local SQL-storage & a local webserver.
• music recommendation service & social network Last.fm was aquired by broadcasting network CBS. in other news, Last.fm has now an official blog.

if you’re still curious about your listening habits, Rocketsurgeon just published a nice overview on more than 10 Last.fm-visualizers & attention-analyzers.

I’m off to Barcelona for the rest of the week, see you soon!

Kalu Kalu’s visualization script unveils the (more or less) long tail of your listening habits using attention-data recorded on Last.fm (found on Rocketsurgeon, which is a good read for all things Music 2.0).

as reported here a few days ago, Last.fm  hast now started to integrate video-content with their service. nothing groundbreaking like personalized video-channels for now though, but nifty quality clips for selected artists (check The Knife for some examples).

Janko Röttgers, author of “Mix, Burn & RIP” (sort of german “standard” literature on the digital music revolution) wrote a Giga-OM-post on LastTube, another take on YouTube vs. Last.fm, questioning the economic eligibility of mashed up webapps. I had similar thoughts when Google released My Maps few weeks ago… like those niche mapping-apps’, last.tv & LastTube will probably be rendered obsolete once Last.fm is launching their original video-features. on the other hand, given the minimal investment required for most of these mashups, it’s probably only fair to leave financials aside and see them as fun projects which can at least help creative developers to get their name out there.

ps: btw, I had an interesting talk with a friend who’s currently doing an internship at a small independent label in Vienna - his job includes looping the label’s compilations all day long to push their artists within Last.fm

instead of the much anticipated video-upgrade, we just have received a very cool Last.fm flash-widget, which is embedding personalized radio-streams (”recently played”…), playlists & charts to any given website. check the sidebar of this page, press the “play”-button & start grooving (click here if you’re reading this post in your RSS-reader!) …stunning!

(more on TechCrunch)

nothing about this on the official Last.fm-page yet (their blog is kind of hard to find), but Read/Write Web and Mashable both report that the music recommendation service & social network based on the Audioscrobbler technology is about to add video-support within this week! unlike YouTube, which is host to millions of low-res music-clips without legal authorization, Last.fm will probably leverage it’s existing relationships with music-labels to offer a legally solid portfolio of video-content, just like they do with audio today. R/WW:

Initially it will be mainly independent labels featured on the video Last.fm - such as Ninja Tune, Nettwerk Music Group, Domino, Warp, Atlantic and Mute. However among the rosters of those independents are brand name artists like the Arctic Monkeys, Moby and Aphex Twin. Last.fm has also made partnerships with big labels like EMI and Warner, along with “over 20,000 independent labels

moreover, Last.fm will offer superior audio-quality (128kbit/s) over YouTube’s poor 64Kbit/s, less than radio-quality encoding. while probably not part of the initial release, I bet a personalized video-channel based on already existing preference-profiles is only a matter of time - you may call it “MTV 2.0″, like R/WW’s Richard MacManus legitimately did.

update: if you can’t wait for Last.fm’s video-feature, I suggest trying out Last.tv in the meantime: the work of two dutch students, this very cool site mashes up your Last.fm profile with YouTube!

Lee Byron rendered some amazing graphs using his Last.fm-attention data. (via Mind Your Own Business). I guess he had to record the data himself, as Last.fm’s API doesn’t seem to expose historical data?

fowa2007 - day #1

11.40 - Simon Wardley on commoditizing of IT: “there’s no sense whatsoever in setting up your own IT-infrastructure. maintaining your own web- or database-servers is what we call yak-shaving“. Zimki offers “pre-shaved yaks”, meaning a fully hosted, server-side javascript environment for rapid application development (not to forget Amazon S3 & EC2, which commoditizes web-infrastructure on a lower level).

13.45 - Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia talk about attention data, tag cloud moderation and past, presence & future of Last.fm. they also shared some stunning usage numbers:

15mio tracks are scrobbled each day (that’s 1575 174 /sec or 6billion tracks since 2003). there are 190mio artists, 70 mio tracks, 700k tracks available for streaming, 145k artist wikis.

14.45 - CTO Amazon Werner Vogels sells us on S3, EC2 & SQS (Simple Queueing Service) and encourages companies to compete on ideas, not on technology. currently, the 30/70-switch rule demands 70% resources spent on the technological “heavy lifting”, while only 30% go into the product/idea. posterboy S3-implementations include SmugMug, SecondLife (just for client-downloads), YouOS; renderRocket (a virtual renderfarm) is one of few current EC2-users. interesting detail: Mechnical Turk’s not internationally available because of conflicts with labour-laws.

16.20 - according to this post, Kevin Rose is about to make an announcement regarding digg later today. stay tuned for real-time updates

17.20 - Rose enters the stage… his talks’ topic is “the future of crowd generated media”…talking about the Digg-ecosystems, motivations for users to digg & submit content - Digg trys to buid incentives for users on every level (frontpage-exposure, traffic, networks of friends etc). he’s mostly summarizing what Digg has been doing the past two years. enhancing Digg (stuff they’re working on): how to manage a user-community of 900k, how-to implement fact-checking on stories (Digg does community-based, since a paid employees a la netscape.com won’t scale). Digg wants to enable/create connections between users based on several numbers - Diggs, buries, comments, word-strength etc. showing some slides on development of Digg-usage since 2005 + summarizing their flash-tools + announcing a “Flash Toolkit” later that year, which should help publishers monitoring their stories. commitment on APIs & export of user attention-data. finally the announcement: Digg is going to support OpenID in the future (also see TechCrunch)

that’s it for today…Wifi didnt really work very well, plus it’s not free maybe we’re more lucky tomorrow.

Janko Röttgers from netzwelt.de discovered snappradio.com, a cool mashup developed at Sun Labs. snappradio generates flickr-slideshows accompanying the music currently playing on last.fm by matching tags between both services. as Janko points out, this works quite well for better-known bands but might also bring out funny results (like getting aeroplane-shots from North Western Alliance [=airline] while listening to rap-pioneers NWA )

(screenshot courtesy of netzwelt.de)