Dear Science,
The post serves no more than an excuse to post a track from the great new TV on the Radio album, “Dear Science,”:
Halfway Home
Elephant Gun
One of my favorite bands, for sentimental reasons, is Brooklyn’s Beirut (ok, the reasons are that I was born in Beirut, and spent a long time in Central and Eastern Europe, which their music reminds me of). Here’s a nice live version of one of their best, “Elephant Gun”, recorded during the Studio 104, Masion de Radio sessions:
WordPress iphone app
Like 5,000 other people at this very moment, I am trying out the new wordpress app for the iPhone. This is something wordpress users have been eagerly waiting for, as there was no real mobile publishing support for wordpress up until now.
So far, so good….
Otis Tripping
Great Otis Redding take on the Beatles’ classic:
Sound and Vision in JC, July 4
JC firenukes, originally uploaded by Josh Engroff.
Lots of sound, not much vision, and David Bowie was nowhere to be seen. But it was a great 4th on the Hudson, and the humidity provided some cool visual effects, like this celebratory nuclear attack.
Jango makes a strong march up the music charts
Thought I’d post an update on Jango and the social music front. The May Comscore data ranking the top 520 music sites in the US reveals some interesting things:
- Jango is now at spot 32, up 10 slots from the March ‘08 version of this report
- we moved ahead of MP3.com, ilike.com, Audible.com, RollingStone.com, eMusic, Zune.net, and Disney Music
- we will soon pass Billboard.com and Spiralfrog in monthly uniques
- we are more than half the size of Last.fm in the US (bought last year by CBS for $280 million)
- we are #9 of all 520 sites in terms of average minutes per visit (an important measure of user satisfaction), beating AOL Music, Yahoo Music, Pandora, playlist.com, last.fm
And we got here only 7 months after public launch; Last.fm, by comparison, has been around since 2002.
I am estimating our July numbers to be much higher than May and June.
Here’s an excerpt of the Comscore chart, in order of US monthly uniques (in 000s):
Johnny Cash doing a Folger’s commercial
Great old ad from I’m guessing the 60s; need to find the exact year:
Discovering, sharing and experiencing music in the machine age
Interesting podcast with Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay, on the evolution of music recommendation from a critic-based system to a machine-based one:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3655.html
Among other things, the conversation touches on whether it is possible for a non-human (e.g. a network, or series of algorithms) to curate recommend music in a meaningful way. The interviewer makes the claim that automated recommendation systems like Pandora seem too mechanical, and both agree that “the voice of the curator animates the playlist.”
In my mind, this debate has less to do with whether machines can make meaningful music recommendations, but whether a networked group of people–enabled through software, the social web, algorithms, etc–can serve this function. Pandora employs musicologists to create the connective tags between different pieces of music, Jango uses the networked effect of passive and active music ratings, as well as editorial content and other things, to do so.
We have been accustomed through history to see the role of the curator inhabited only by an individual; with the social web enabling the creation of “taste” networks of scale, there is no reason why this should continue to be so.
Politics: plus ca change…
Letter from John Adams to Benjamin Rush, February 6, 1805:
“Is the present state of the national republic enough? Is virtue the principle of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst for riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction the motive and principle that governs?”
And from later that year:
“My friend! Our country is a masquerade! No party, no man dares to avow his real sentiments. All is disguise, vizard, cloak.”
