Another new, clued record label

Techdirt writes up another MP3 and customer friendly startup label, Loca, and comments:

...sounds like more new music labels are going with this approach. At this point, they're all small time operations - but it's a step in the right direction. It will take time, but these new labels that are both artist and consumer friendly are going to be what kills the old time recording industry...

What he said. And you know, there's another way to get to the critical mass platform that I foresee: a roll-up. Some of you M&A artistes might want to be keeping a list... [Due Diligence]

3:28:09 AM    

What IS this??

PeopleAggregator alpha is A material..

The PeopleAggregator is starting to come together very nicely. Feels simple, usage nearly obvious. A pleasant experience. Pretty easy to define relationships.

And it's built on xml.

Here's my public page and the RDF underneath it.

Some thoughts on relationship vectors...  

When I declare my connection to someonein PA, I pick one of these types:

• know of
• don't know but want to
• know of in passing
• know by reputation
• acquaintance
• friend
• close friend
• relative

The degrees of friendship are very nice and upbeat, but I think it conflates (a word I don't get to use very often) three dimensions into one:

• time (past, present, possible future relationship),
• strength (distant to close relationship), and
• attraction (love, neutral, hate).

I should be able to declare that I mildly dislike Amy, my current wife. Or that I intensely hate Bob, my former boss. Or that I have a crush on Cat, this person I barely know. If the scales are quantified, you can do marvelous things with recommendations, matching, etc.

Add an "other relationship" category to accomodate the many ways we define our relationships. "Slept with", "worked with", "screwed over", "blogrolled but never met", "makes me gag", "lust after", "we're both Elks", "divorced me", and of course "know, but don't want to" (needing to divest). "Family" is also a pretty broad and shallow bucket; Genealogy XML covers more of that ground. And this doesn't even get into culture-specific notions; tribal affiliation means different things if you are a Native American, a Jew, a Boy Scout, or a Kurd. Leave room for those wonderful connections and the results will astonish. 

[a klog apart]

[a klog apart]

3:25:32 AM    

Score one for the good guys...

Register.  Archive.org to host the independent music titles stored in collections in the now defunct MP3.com.

"Our approach is to provide unlimited bandwidth forever for free," he told us today. "There's no amount of material that frightens us. MP3.com's collection is five terabytes. No sweat. We've been adding forty terabytes a month." Kahle added that the archive.org had plenty of bandwidth too.

[John Robb's Weblog]

3:18:16 AM