webponce rants

We’re quite mainstream really.

1. The Beatles
2. Various Artists
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers
4. Massive Attack
5. Jay-Z
6. Groove Armada
7. Air
8. The Killers
9. David Bowie
10. Zero 7

See more at our last.fm account

I’ve mentioned on this blog before about barriers to entry for innovations like opensocial or openid - and how some things are just too technical to become interesting to the mainstream. here is something which is lowering that barrier - and possibly (until tonight) the most anticipated 404 page i’ve ever bookmarked - http://www.google.com/friendconnect.

FriendConnect promises to offer social tools through basic embeds and snippets of codes, allowing content developers who aren’t necessarily the most technically savvy, to still enable their site with the power of social networking.

David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, explains “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

Watch this, and many other spaces.

Occasionally I remember how much of a geek i am, and worry myself. This is one of those times, normal people don’t/shouldn’t get so excited about web analytics tools. However, i’m not normal, so http://piwik.org/ has made me sit up and say ‘oooh’. I’ve long wished i could do something more with the data *inside* google analytics, and piwik seems to solve that problem, not to mention using open source and non-prop software. I’d worry a little about constant hits to a db, and its scalability (as i’ve seen with slim’s implementation of mint) - but its certainly worth a punt on a smaller site, and the API is worth looking at. Watch this tiny space.

A new product from the innovation masters, Schulze and Webb, supported ably by my good friend Amy T. and her team at BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D.

Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.

http://schulzeandwebb.com/2008/olinda/

Awesome! (I know how it feels)

http://leavemealonebox.com

Yes, i’ve checked the date, no it is not an april fool:

Publisher plans printed version of Wikipedia

As twitter increases in users and awareness in the mainstream, more and more people are asking ‘yeah, but why?‘, more so than many other arguably less useful services. I’m not sure why so many people need a definitive answer to use what is such a simple service to join. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss sums it up best I think:

There are so many possible uses for Twitter. It’s a very functional group messaging service - if your ten closest mates were signed up you could say ‘I’m in the pub’ and would only have to send one message instead of paying for ten. And you could also use it for more creative projects, something I’d like to explore when I clone myself and have some time to do ‘art’ outside of all-consuming work time.

The real point, though, is that we should all be a little more willing to explore these tools without feeling the need to classify it or nail it down to some definite function when it is still so young. So many inventions were born out of a completely different idea; vinyl records were a spin-off (no pun intended) from a project for talking dolls or some such… It’s far easier to dismiss something out of hand than to be open-minded, creative and playful.

Whilst i’m not surprised to see it happen, its great to actually see quantative reports that giving away free music does have a commercial benefit. last.fm, since launching their full length tracks service, have influenced an almost 120% increase in real sales throught their partnership with amazon. Last.fm, who have over five million full length tracks available on their service, reckon existing users are purchasing 66% more music as a result of the free tracks being available via the site.

I’m personally one of those people. I used to discover new music on Pandora and immediately go and buy the albums via amazon - but since its UK closure, I’ve had to rely on last.fm to find new artists, and probably buy two or three albums a month of artists i’ve never heard on the radio - far more music than i ever used to buy before making use of sites such as last.fm and imeem. I just hope the record labels take these figures to heart and realise not all digital consumers are out to ’steal music’.

via [mashable]

Amazon have started producing word clouds for books in their catalogue, based upon the most commonly used word within the book.

Take this for example:

Does anything eat wasps?

Hover over the word for an occurance count, click on the word for a list of excerpts containing that word. Very very neat. They’re doing all of the things you’d want to / would do in a book store by allowing you to flick through the index and contents pages, and providing you a level of inspection of the content which you’d never be able to grasp by simply flicking through.

When they’re able to let me feel the stock of the paper, then maybe i’m sold.

There’s also a review of Does Anything Eat Wasps over at Books in the Bog.