I got this one from Paul Lamere’s MusicMachinery blog…. it’s so cool. Not really super useful yet in my experience, but TOTALLY COOL even so.
You install LastHistory. You put in your Last.fm username. It parses through your listening history. Then you get a graphical representation of your listening over time, that looks something like this.
But you won’t get it, quite, til you play with it yourself. To save you time in doing so, I recorded a ScreenJelly screencast so you can see the interaction. Unfortunately ScreenJelly seems not to embrace remote embedding so you’lll have to make the jump to their domain to see it…. here it is. http://screenjel.ly/watch/OAi7kRm2o4o
For those digital music geeks and also just the other generally really cool folks who like to organize and simplify their online music life, look no further because Dan Kantor has created another fabulous solution: Extension.FM.
Extension.FM is a Google Chrome extension (yes this means you have to install Google Chrome, but you will be glad you did, I think). It keeps track of all of the online music you encounter as you surf across various music blogs like Spinner, Pitchfork, Tuneage, and Fluxblog. Like an elephant, but much faster than an elephant, Extension.fm remembers every single web reference, all the song metadata, including album art etcetera that you find as you surf. In fact as of today, it also can import the top 50 songs from your Tumblr dashboard. The result? A web-based personalized music discovery experience that aggregates your favorite sources and helps you simplify your web-based listening into one place. It also scrobbles to Last.fm (sweet!).
What’s next? I dunno – probably whatever is coolest that the best users of Extension.fm (like me) ask for most. I think it’s local playlisting support. But I could be wrong. It could be a social filter, or two. Hell, it’s great already, so everything else will be gravy!
Last weekend my parents dropped off a cardboard box. This box, I discovered, was a box full of desk materials I sent back from the UK to home, during my last few weeks of graduate school at Oxford. In it I discovered a lot of pencil leads, a well-wrapped ink pot, a pair of (now-broken) Wayfarer sunglasses, countless postcards of paintings I really liked, a handful of photos, a “Bananas in Pyjamas” mousepad, a box of 3 1/2″ floppy disks with many papers and notes inside, I’m sure, countless pens, a screwdriver, two blankets, two pairs of pants, and lastly: the pipe that Marina had sent to me from the High Street Tobacconist my first week in Oxford, because “every English Professor needs a pipe.”
That box had been sitting somewhere in my parents’ house for the past eleven years. Here’s a little collage of a handful of these items.
A handful of stuff from a box of desk things from graduate school
This one should have more staying power. We used large storage container blocks for the first two tiers, then medium-sized blocks on the next few tiers, then went to the smaller blocks as we created the conical cupola. The big block on the top is a keystone, I hope, forcing everything to hold shape. It was a workout, and a lot of fun!
Here’s a 30-second video slideshow I made with Animoto.
About 15 years ago I spent a couple years writing a thesis about the emergence of multimedia representation from the 18th to the 20th centuries as a force of cultural change. Put simply – the fact that when creators mixed imagery with language, meaning became more accessible to the educated and (importantly) the illiterate, and opened new avenues of thought to create more opportunity – or in many cases, to fight oppression. I didn’t know it would be that relevant to whatever I did next as I left academia, but fate led me to creating the next generation of connected products on the web, and as I have recently learned, representational theory and case studies from former centuries demonstrating the effect of representational technique on society, is more relevant to what we are experiencing today, than I ever would have expected. Much like the “Human Condition” – it doesn’t change, it just repeats and adapts itself to present conditions…
At this point I’m hung up on two things that would seem dichotomous: the future, and the immediate now.
The “immediate now” is more than the concept of moments fleeting every moment. At this point, the concept of “NOW” has been popularized by connected devices to mean access to immediate information, as it happens. This access is not ubiquitous, but the principle is demonstrated, and more and more, culture is adapting to wanting “nowness” in many contexts.
On the other side of the dichotomy I am focused on the future because I want to predict how these dynamics will trend into future opportunity. I’d like to create a business in providing the vehicles wherein businesses flourish in the future economies of data exchange, spanning many dimensions of relevance, whether they be semantic, geospatial, social, temporal, or some other dimension I haven’t thought of yet.
The Global Brain
At this point, the people of Earth are sufficiently connected and communicating in real-time that the Earth begins to resemble a global brain, creating new inferences by the pulses of information we pass to each other, actively and passively, and the results that ensue in real life. Each person a neuron, each connection, a synapse.
We can see that in the past centuries certain tools and technologies have activated communication patterns, let’s call them “thought patterns”, when they enabled connections or synapses between motivated peoples, communities. concepts or prospects. This has increased in velocity, at orders of magnitude, from the 18th century to the 19th, and from the 19th, to the 20th. This adaptation/corruption of Moore’s law, or the approximation toward vertical asymptote, looks probable also in this case, for the 21st. At some point on reaching vertical, profound change may happen (this is where I go scifi, the rest is all logical).
What have we been doing to actuate this increased pace of development & capability? Regardless of the century, we have been using available toolsets to iterate on the current extensible connections, which can further grow, branch, and reconnect. As human brains grow and develop, so do cultures eventually follow at one order greater, and where cultures and empirical forces prevail, organisms also adapt. At various degrees of magnification, the rebranching and growth of possibility happens in child development, in community growth, in cultural development, and it happens ultimately in the evolution of species.
If you haven’t seen this video, it illustrates the concept, somewhat spiritual, of our place in a spatial cosmos, and infinitely extensible, even without reference to the time dimension necessarily. It’s 70s Nova stuff, never gets old, just like The Miracle of Life, which moved me in the Expecting Parents class 7 years ago.
So, we are now at a place where the availability of connected data makes a global brain, or a semantic web, an actual and tangible prospect. However, many, in fact I would guess most, areas of global consciousness (datasets) are willfully disconnected – they are “dark”. Those dark areas are not subconscious, they are just unconnected, unharnessed regions. Why are they dark? In most cases, I think, because owners of connectable data are not ready to connect them. They fear the loss of advantage by making their advantagous data available for connection. These are dark, but high-potential areas of the global brain.
My thesis is that creating an environment wherein owners of tight-held data become encouraged to open up their data with some, perhaps flexible, assurance of reciprocity, will yield a greater benefit to all via a larger potential in the global brain.
My suggestion to accomplish such willingness to open up datasets, is to create an open specification and platform for data exchange, which rationalizes all contributing datasets where possible, and allows undefined data elements to be added and where possible subsequently rationalized as well, against the specification. It would then create a controlled marketplace for exchange of proprietary data, which would be metered not on a one-to-one basis, but on a one-to-many, creating a mutually-beneficial collective.
So, I have a big announcement in Grant Cerny land.
In the beginning of any given year there are all of these prophets, false- and otherwise, who rally to make predictions for the upcoming year. What they’re all looking for is the “next big thing.”
I had a few ideas about what the next big thing for 2010 would be, which informed my judgment as I found myself personally preoccupied with my own next big thing since December 2009. Fact is, last December I made the very difficult decision to part from the AOL mothership, wherein I’ve grown, and built, and helped build, and where I loved and was loved by many, for the past 5 1/2 years. My decision is a personal one; I am as bullish for AOL as ever, and even today spent an hour on AOL Music’s CD Listening Party devouring the new RJD2 album… AOL’s leadership and strategy is strong, and as a leaner, now-public company, I believe AOL will thrive. But I knew that for me, even so, there was a “next thing” banging around in my head, and I took some time to think about what was a “next big thing.”
Many options suggested themselves to me, including major media, startups, consulting, and entrepreneurship. I put my toe into a few of these options in the past month.
Where I landed, though, was a somewhat familiar place — KickApps! I’ve been working with Mike Sommers and Alex Blum over the past few years to try to find the right cocktail of KickApps with AOL, and so already had a great understanding of the platform and the people. After some quick thought, it made a whole lot of sense. Yes, starting in February I’ll be joining up with the KickApps team to push the next phase in the social media revolution. I couldn’t be more excited.
KickApps is positioned with the platform and the capabilities to superserve all web publishers including enterprise to entry-level brand marketers, small business owners, individuals and communities of all varieties, with all of the core publishing, social, and media capabilities needed, with no need for an IT staff to stand it up. In addition they have already fostered a huge developer community – critical to expanding reach and innovation. And there is much more potential as well in connecting inter-community data with connected, non-KickApps datasets. KickApps has done a hell of a lot in the past 3 years or so but I’m looking forward to doing a lot more.
For those who know the focus I put into working on data availability and community engagement (AIM integrations in Streampad with Dan Kantor, the Music Usage Database, message boards & comments social syndication, 3rd party delegated authentication, Love.com) and the real-time web (Love.com, Relegence-powered newstreams, etc.) over the past year and change, know that for me, the “Next Big Thing” on the Web really is enabling the global brain of social consciousness to be more quickly and consistently connected – to increase the saturation potential in the world we all live in, and to deliver to each one of us tools enabling us to extract the most from our four dimensions of experience – semantic relevance, social relevance, geospatial relevance, and timeliness — with maximum effectiveness in minimum time. The NOW Generation is now, like right now, or as my South African ex-housemate Erich Maritz might have said some 12 years ago, “not just now, but now now“.
For right now, I’m confident that I know what the next big thing is – and ready to make it bigger. It’s an irresistible opportunity to join with a very talented team, with a very effective and proven platform, and be a part of what I am sure will be a great success in 2010 and beyond.
I built this igloo yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately because the rain was coming on, I didn’t get my real camera out and I only got this pic with a Blackberry.
Grant's Igloo, took 2 hours to build.
Then it rained all day today. What a terrible day weather-wise for the day after Christmas. The kids had been planning to play Eskimo Family, or Russian Tea Party again, in that igloo. But no, we were indoors all day while the Igloo slowly melted away, but to its credit (and to the credit of its craftsman), it still hasn’t actually fallen, it’s just a withered, low-weight skeleton of its former might. Maybe this is the way to create featherlight igloos. OK, enough futurism. Here is the withered igloo.
It still holds up, but barely. Surely signs of excellent craftsmanship.
I may post future updates on the demise of the Igloo of Christmas Day 2009, in subsequent updates to this post. Which I’m sure would be very well appreciated by the igloo-spotters amongst you.
Fancy post title – simple update. Maeve started crawling last week. Right now she’s making her first laps around the kitchen island, just like the “Circus Maximus” of Ella & Isabel fame. It must be wondrous to discover that the world is not only so colorful, but stretches out so many places you can go! Her world will keep getting bigger every day now… just like she’s getting bigger. That kid is turning into a little tank! Go, tank, go!
Today Dan Kantor and I attended the Music Hackday Boston, at the Microsoft NERD (New England Research & Development Center) in Boston. What a day. I was only able to attend for the one day, while Dan is here the whole weekend.
I caught up on everything that’s going on with Playdar, the open music-resolver technology started by Richard Jones, founder/former CTO of Last.fm, and pretty widely embraced by the whole music hacking / music product innovation community, whereby running a lightweight server on a local host can take any given bunch of requested music tracks, and find local or networked matching media files, to “resolve” or find sources for, the music in question. Given that we were all on the same local net and running the playdar localhosts, it was fascinating to see how hacking devs (and me, a has-been dev, now product evangelist) created new ways to express music discovery within and amongst our local media collective, as well as the many extensions offered by the EchoNest APIs, and other sources. I am loathe to have to head home in the morning, since the demos of everyone’s hacks are being reviewed Sunday. But Dan will catch me up on his hack and all the rest.
The very long day resulted in a great deal of critical thought and creative energy for me. I came up with a number of ideas regarding Music Influencer extensions, which I think can result in an ecosystem of incentive for platform providers (such as EchoNest), integrating developers, catalog-holding providers (such as Last.fm), music publishers, labels and artists themselves. The thrashing of the music industry will be solved, one way or the other, in the upcoming few years, as labels and artists regain equlibrium in the new value chain, and it’s likely that the resolvers like Playdar and the platforms like EchoNest are positioned to offer the mediating layer which properties on all levels of the chain can utilize to restore playfulness, fun, extensible openness and scale to Music in the new, networked, real-time web world.
We ended up at Jimmy D’s in Davis Square, at the “EchoNestival”, a party thrown by the EchoNest sponsors, where we three acts played, and got progressively more intense and awesome – Faces on Film, The Bodega Girls, and EL – P. I have at least three new albums to buy after tonight’s lineup, that’s for certain.
Many thanks to Microsoft, the EchoNest and other givers in making today’s hackday (and tomorrow’s which I will miss) a great success.
It was also great to meet Paul Lamere, Tristan Harris and Brian Whitman from the EchoNest, as well as to catch up with Jason Herskowitz, and to meet Lucas Gonze and get philosophical about how real-time, space-erased data availability can modify and multiply the progress of cultural and psychological evolution.
I look forward to reviewing the results of Sunday’s hack presentation demos.
I don’t often get around to writing about music, and that’s probably indicative of how long I have to listen to it. But I’m finally getting around to the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs and I LOVE it. Alternatively jammin and strong, then slow and evocative, but always VERY full of sound. Well done. Strong recommend.
http://screenjel.ly/watch/OAi7kRm2o4o
