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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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