Month: February 2009

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A Sound Approach to Exploratory Music Search?

I just noticed an article today in CNET, “Mufin Player organizes songs by sound“, that describes mufin:

mufin’s music recommendations are based on the sound of the music itself. Only the similarity in sound decides whether a track is recommended or not.

Check it out–you don’t need to download any player in order to explore the 5M+ songs they’ve already indexed. I found the recommendations to be a bit erratic,  but I’m intrigued by the concept, especially after being underwhelmed by Apple’s Genius recommendation engine. So far my preferred music exploration tool is Pandora, about which my only complaint is its limited repertoire.

I know we have music information retrieval experts in the house, and I’m sure we have lots of music consumers. I’m curious to hear what folks think of mufin. Tempting but half-baked?

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Who Says I’m An Authority?

Every now and then I try to sneak in a self-indulgent post, and this happens to be such post. I decided to look at Technorati to see how they measured the authority of The Noisy Channel, as well as the basis for that measurement.

As of this writing, The Noisy Channel has an authority of 65, which makes it the 80,964th most authoritative blog indexed by Technorati. Not sure if that’s good or bad–I’m way behind Perez Hilton!

But I do owe what little authority I have to the 65 blogs that have linked to me in the past 180 days. Here are my ten most authoritative bestowers of Technorati authority:

While I’m not sure how much to read into these numbers, I do appreciate the link love.  Traffic to The Noisy Channel has steadily increased over the past months, and I know I owe that in large part to reader evangelism–through links from other blog, Twitter, and perhaps even good old-fashioned word-of-mouth.

So, to all of you, and by the authority you all have invested in me, thanks! This noise is for you.

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Dunbar Lives!

The other day, I talked about the “real” Twitter: the sparse subgraph of meaningful social relationships buried in the far denser follower graph. Well, it turns out that Facebook’s own “in-house sociologist” Cameron Marlow has documented a similar phenomenon on Facebook:

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

  • Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
  • Messages or chats with 16 friends

Students of sociology have long been familiar with Dunbar’s number, which Wikipedia defines as “the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”. Others have proposed different limits, but everyone seems to agree that the number is less than 300–something that you might not know from looking at the follower / connection statistics of online social networks.

Of course, this cognitive limit reflects attention scarcity. Wouldn’t it be nice if online social networks did too. I’m trying!

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Users Will Pay For Content–And Not Just iTunes

Saul Hansell writes in his post “Why Are iPhone Users Willing to Pay for Content?“:

What’s most interesting is how iPhone users are willing to spend money in ways that Web users are not.

I’ve criticized Apple from time to time for not having a coherent approach to delivering free content with advertising. But in some ways, the development of a market for paid content is a bigger and less expected achievement.

I’ve had my sanity questioned for believing that there’s life beyond ad-supported content. In fairness, Apple has learned that it’s got to sell content cheaply, whether it’s $0.99 for a song or $4.99 for an ebook. But cheap is a lot better than free, and it gives authors / content providers a model that is not beholden to advertisers.

So, the next time someone mocks my opposition to the ad-supported model, my battle cry will be “What Would Apple Do?”,

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It’s OK To Tweet

The other day, Owen Thomas at Valleywag smirked about the audience at Times Open that “sat and Twittered instead of listening to the speaker”. To which I say, take a look at our tweets and you’ll see that people were listening intently.

I’m glad that Congress isn’t reading Valleywag: CNN reports that members of Congress twittered through Obama’s big speech:

Members of Congress twittered their way through President Obama’s nationally televised speech Tuesday night, providing a first-of-its-kind running commentary that took users of the social networking site inside the packed House chamber.

I hope this mainstream use of Twitter inspires audiences to play a more active role not only as listeners but also contributors to the conversations that good speeches are designed to inspire.

Of course, there remains the question of establishing social norms for live audiences who are torn between looking at the speaker and typing. Ironically, I remember being yelled at in class for *not* taking notes! Perhaps the people who most need coaching at the speakers who have to face live-tweeting audiences. Here’s some advice on the subject from speaking expert Olivia Mitchell.

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Do Speech-to-Text Readers Need To License Peformance Rights?

Now that the new Kindle includes an apparently listenable text-to-speech reader, the Authors Guild is crying foul that this feature exploits authors and violates their rights:

Publishers certainly could contractually prohibit Amazon from adding audio functionality to its e-books without authorization, and Amazon could comply by adding a software tag that would prohibit its machine from creating an audio version of a book unless Amazon has acquired the appropriate rights. Until this issue is worked out, Amazon may be undermining your audio market as it exploits your e-books.

In a New York Times op-ed entitled “The Kindle Swindle“, Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr. says:

What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.

In my view, doing so would set a frightening precedent. The speech-to-text transformation is completely mechanical. I have no doubt that the Authors Guild can come up with contract language that forbids applying transformation to their members’ content, essentially as a kind of digital rights management (DRM). But I’d be sad to see this happen. I thought we were moving beyond this stuff.

Besides, this is simply not worth fighting over. Good audio books are dramatic readings, and those will never be possible from anything we’ve seen in mechanical speech-to-text. Perhaps I’m being short-sighted on that front. But I’ll eat my words when AI proves me wrong.

I have no doubt that the author guilds in the various creative industries can find a way to codify these claims in their licensing terms. I just hope that we’re not heading for a direction where private, mechanical transformation isn’t simply part of the fair use package.

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Are Media Companies Out-Innovating Their Advertisers?

In “Three Ways the Media is Innovating with New Interfaces“, Micro Persuasion blogger Steve Rubel argues that “media must innovate their way out of this situation from both editorial and sales, but no one seems to be really doing so on the advertising side.” By “this situation”, he means the dismal quality of display ads that is suffering in lockstep with the economy as a whole.

There are lots of people who beat up on media for its mistakes, but it’s interesting that Rubel singles out advertisers. On the editorial side, he praises innovations such as nytxplorer and even “retro” subscriber-based models, like Sporting News Today. He’s also optimistic that media companies will exploit the user experience potential of the iPhone and Kindle.

But he raises the concern that advertising is behind–and this is a major concern if media companies are bound to the ad-supported model. My own hope is that we find a way to move beyond that model. But, if not, then it’s important that advertising catch up with editorial, of all of the latter’s innovation will be in vain.

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How Recommendation Engines Quash Diversity

As regular readers here know, I have strong opinions about how recommendation engines should work. So does Daniel Lemire, a regular reader who specifically argues in favor of diversity in recommender systems. Well, this post is for him and all who share his concern.

In “Does Everything Really Sound Like Coldplay?“, Vegard Sandvold explains:

When a lot of people (who may otherwise have very diverse tastes in music) listen to Coldplay, Coldplay becomes very well connected with a lot of other artists, and also becomes a hub in what is known as a small-world network. Such networks are the basis for social recommendations. Oscar shows that these hubs are indeed the most popular artists, who again gets recommended more often than others. That is why all roads lead to Radiohead.

The cited Oscar is Oscar Celma, who recently defended his PhD thesis on “Music Recommendation and Discovery In The Long Tail”. I’ve only had a chance to skim the abstract, but I’m optimistic that people are giving more thought to the limitations of current recommendation systems. Of course, I’d really like it if they embraced transparency and exploration. But emphasizing diversity is certainly a worthy endeavor.

Or maybe everything really does sound like Coldplay…

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Everything is a Platform

I spent all day Friday learning how the New York Times aspires to become a platform for a brave new world of online news (though they’re still figuring out how to handle user-generated content). Meanwhile, every social network hopes to be *the* platform for social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. To be clear, it’s not just that platforms are the new black; rather everyone wants to control whatever is left after Google has exercised its droit de seigneur as the gateway to online information.

The latest entrant on the aspiring platform front is Wikipedia, at least according to Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb. In a post entitled “Could Wikipedia’s Future Be as a Development Platform?“, Kirkpatrick suggests:

Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, suplemental content and structured data from its years old store of collaboratively generated information.

He also observes that:

There is no formal Wikipedia Application Programming Interface (API) but the data there is relatively accesible anyway. It can be downloaded and proccessed locally.

Having worked with Wikipedia data, I think that access via download is actually a better option than access via an API, particularly since most APIs come with parsimonious rate limits, e.g., 5,000 requests per day for the New York Times APIs. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of New York Times article data *is* available for download, albeit only under non-commercial licensing terms.

In any case, it’s interesting to see the rush to transform everything–but particularly content–into a platform. I can only imagine the marketing geniuses getting ready for platforms of platforms. Of course, what we really need is for all of this information resources to play together nicely enough that we can seamlessly integrate them into applications (yes, that’s what platforms are supposed to help you build!) without worrying which of them are platforms.

Out of the platform frying pan and into the SOA fire…

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Information Wants to be Expensive

Former Wall Street Journal publisher and executive vice-president of Dow Jones L. Gordon Crovitz writes:

When author Stewart Brand coined the expression “Information wants to be free,” he focused on how technology makes it cheap and easy to communicate and share knowledge. But the rest of his quote is rarely noticed. This says, “Information also wants to be expensive.”

Read more in his Wall Street Journal opinion piece, entitled “Information Wants to be Expensive“.