I'm not much of an audiophile, to be honest, and there are lots of
other people who will get more deeply into music-blogging and
playlist-sharing than I'm likely to. But the process at work here is
deeply fascinating to me, and generalizes to other realms. Every kind
of digital experience can thrive in the virtuous cycle of the
blogosphere: use it, capture part of it, link to it, write about it,
search for it, read about it, aggregate it, rinse, lather, repeat.
I've been collaborating with Lucas and Alf (okay, rather coaxing them into working things out) to make the experience tighter among Winamp (the player I use), Webjay, and feedroll
so that bloggers can easily post their finds, promoting good free music
and musiclogging itself at the same time. Once things get nice and
usable enough I think we'll be close to having a decent model case for
the open, collaborative media filtering and recommendation networks of
the future. I'll probably post more about it tomorrow.
When more people start publishing content that
doesn't fit the title/description/url format (recipes, movie reviews,
photos, music playlists, etc.), "standard" formats will start to spring
up (some have already)
and the browsers will need to support them in some fashion. (This
requires that the publishing tools support these new formats as well,
which they eventually will. The whole ecosystem -- readers, publishing
software, publishers, browsers -- will move along in fits and starts,
just like it did with RSS.)
Read/Write Web features a great interview with colorful visionary Marc Canter. A good snapshot both of where the dude has been and where he's going. Choice quotes:
The evolution of tools has brought us to the point where the entire business models
are changing and the essence of what tools are has shifted from something a professional
uses, to something everyone will need to know how to use. A key part of that is the
amateur stuff we alluded to earlier. Everyone takes photos, corresponds, has vacation
videos, baby pictures and albums - the list goes on and on. So the content in our lives
will get treated like content from Hollywood, World news, sports, etc. Disseminating
this, making it easy to author and store, indexing it, applying knowledge management
techniques to humans - is all part of it. New kinds of tools.
[...]
This has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with white males.
As the infrastructure and technology becomes more and more of a commodity and the vested
interests of these white males line up with the needs and goals of Interactive media
(read: greed) - then it'll happen. It has to happen.
It'll be decentralized - but made up of hybrid, meta networks - that still rely upon
centralized servers. It'll be open source and new, yet it will always have some degree of
proprietary-ness - how else does someone make a buck? It'll be a model where amateur
stuff (like Hot or Not and VoyeurWeb) can sit along side Hollywood stuff.
But MOST importantly it's something that enterprise and government/education adopts,
because that's the only way we'll achieve REAL critical mass and lower the costs of the
infrastructure - so that EVERYONE has broadband and that huge mega terabyte servers are
in everyone's homes.
