Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

During Ars Electronica in Linz, I got a chance to hang out with Michael from last.fm. I would have blogged about this earlier, but they have been having server problems and they wanted me to wait until they had stabilized the situation.

Last.fm has been around for awhile now and they've even been covered in Wired so many of you may already know about them. It is a music site based on collaborative filtering. Using one of the many Audioscrobbler plugins, you can set your music player to upload the titles of the music you are playing to their site. This starts to create your profile. You can also go to the site and browse songs and artists and add them to your profile. It will recommend similar artists and also show other fans of those artists. You can browse the profiles of those fans as well. Eventually, you will have enough songs in your profile for it to calculate your neighborhood. These are other members with similar taste. It's quite uncanny how similar some people's taste in music can be. You can visit these people, see what they are listening to, send them messages or add them as friends.

Once you have a healthy neighborhood and profile, the next thing you do is start listening to the radio. Last.fm is MCPS/PRS registered and has a paid license to broadcast music internationally from the UK. Only music registered with MCPS/PRS or registered directly with last.fm will be streamed, but you can listen to your own music collection, anyone else's music collection or your profile neighborhood as an mp3 stream. The web based player window will show the name of the artists, the track, the cover art, the person who's profile it is coming from and a button for "love", "ban", "skip". Anything you like will be added to your profile.

You can configure last.fm to use your local Amazon.com. You can buy most of the albums you browse on Amazon. In addition, labels can sign up on last.fm and sell music directly via downloads. Labels can set their own price. The collaborative filter allows labels to target new songs into the clusters that are most likely to be receptive to a track and the collaborative filter takes over after that.

I think this is an amazing synthesis of traditional business models from the music industry and collaborative filters. I also love how your music becomes your identity. My last.fm page shows what I'm listening to and what I kind of music I like most.

DISCLOSURE: I don't have any official relationship with last.fm yet, but I'm currently talking to them a lot and giving them my feedback and thoughts.

Michael, let me know if I got the facts right.

Lessig blogs about a very important case:

A district court in the Southern District of New York has struck down the anti-bootlegging provision of the copyright act.

Here's another Iraq war video. This one appears to be a strike on a group of people walking down a street in Fallujah. Does anyone else have more information on this video? Has it been aired on any TV network?

If they are civilians, it's quite disturbing. The "aw dude" in the audio doesn't seem like a very appropriate reaction.

The embedded Windows Media Player window didn't work for me in Firefox on OS X, but worked fine in Internet Explorer. You can also use this link to view it directly in Windows Media Player.

Via Paul

As of yesterday, Wikipedia is inaccessible from most of China. It appears to be inaccessible from 11 out of 12 points in China. It was blocked for a few days back in June or so, but this block appears to be broader than the last one. Hope this one gets resolved quickly too.

Yes. Yet another social networking site... I decided to play with this one for awhile before blogging it to make sure it was significantly different. I think it is. Plazes takes your IP address and tries to figure out where you are asks for the address of where you are and maps it to the MAC address of the router you are connected to. If you are in a new "plaze" you can register it by entering the address, uploading pictures, making comments. You can see who is online and where they are. You can see people by how far away they are from you. I imagine that once it gets going, most common hang outs will have lots of comments and pictures and you will be able to find people in your vicinity to hook up with. It's a bit like a laptop version of dodgeball. I'm "Joi" on Plazes.

And in other YASNS news, I finally got my wallop (Microsoft Research's SNS) invitation. I'm "Joi" there as well.

kitephoto.JPG
Ever wanted to take digital pictures from a kite? Phillip Torrone who brought us the Search Engine Belt Buckles shows us how. He makes it sound so easy.

In a few hours I'll be leaving New York to go back to Japan. Met so many interesting people this trip and the weather was beautiful. Thanks!

Sorry about the light blogging. I've been a bit busy in New York. Here's something to to fill the void. Presenting, The Horn Guy (Windows Media Player)

from eBaum's World via Scott

The concert tonight was amazing. I hope people got a chance to watch the video feed. Gil/Byrne were amazing and were eventually able to get a house full of somewhat tired old people on their feet and dancing. It was also amazing to realize how much Talking Heads songs were a part of my DNA... anyway. Maybe more when I'm less tired. Need to go to bed.

Oh, and David Byrne dedicated "Road to Nowhere" to the Repbulicans.

Adina has a nice essay about why participants in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production are not necessarily communists. If you don't have time to read Benkler's 80 page Coase's Peguin paper, I suggest you read Adina's essay which picks up some important points that you don't get in the abstract.