A similar system that I prefer is Last FM (http://www.last.fm). The
system works in a similar way, but relys more on social networking for
finding similar music. Additionally, it has feature-rich social
networking functions that track your listening habits, find "neighbors"
who like similar music, etc.
You can peak at my profile if you are curious what a young library geek
is listening to: http://www.last.fm/user/carvedhearts/
(Here's a nice blog post about their somewhat differing approaches:
http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2006/01/pandora_and_las.html)
--
My question that I keep coming back to is: How do we provide
feature-rich social networking functionality in our applications without
undermining privacy? The last thing we want is a Facebook Beacon on our
hands. With Facebook, Youtube and others, the benefit for a large
population seems to somehow outweigh what they are giving up (privacy,
mounds of data sold to advertisers, and intellectual property). It is a
incredible time right now where a company like YouTube makes billions
off the content and creativity of others.
This is something we thought about with our tagging feature in VuFind.
Why would someone tag a record in the catalog? Most likely not because
they are thinking about the good of the community, there has to be a
benefit to the user to participate. So, what we developed was a
del.icio.us inspired favorites/bookmarks system that is organized by
tags. If you add a record to your favorites you can tag it to keep your
account organized. That tag is then added to the global tag for the
record, and the most used float to the top.
As for #3 (Bling): What kind of bling can you expect when so many
libraries hire a librarian to do the job of a professional
graphic/interface designer and so many vendors think the job is done
when a programmer finishes the code and then doesn't let you touch the
interface without breaking your contract?
Best,
Chris Barr
Villanova University
http://www.vufind.org
Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> To see how another way the description of content coupled with a easy-
> to-use interface can be implemented on the Web, give a go at a music
> site called Pandora*:
>
> http://www.pandora.com/
>
> Apparently a number of a years ago a few music buffs got together and
> started describing recorded music this way, that way, and every which
> way but loose using about 400 distinct characteristics (blues,
> guitar, acoustic, solo, rhythmically challenging, etc.). They didn't
> do it all by hand. They had some help from computing techniques.
>
> They then created an Flash interface to the collection. It lets you
> enter a song or artist you like. It finds the songs and addresses the
> issue, "Find me more like this one" to create "radio stations". It is
> amazingly accurate. Users can then give thumbs up or down votes for
> the music it recommends. You can write reviews, blogs, and see what
> your friends have played.
>
> Naturally I looked at the thing through my Librarian Glasses. We
> describe things this way, that way, and the other way too. We have
> many more than 400 distinct characteristics. What we haven't done is:
>
> 1) exploited computing techniques to "catalog" bunches o' stuff
> 2) integrated social networking functionality into our system
> 3) presented our tools complete with "bling"
>
> Increasingly these sorts of features make for useful and widely used
> systems. I believe we have something to learn here.
>
> * Thanks to Ralph LeVan who invited me to use Pandora via Facebook.
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>
>
Received on Fri Jan 25 2008 - 12:22:34 EST