Software over the rainbow

I’m always amazed at the use of tags in last.fm, specially for songs.

Some random examples I’ve seen lately:

• Stereolab - Hallucinex: resistance is futile, electronic renaissance, sounds like sun, sigh and swoon in equal measure.
• Stereolab - Nothing to do with me: music to edit pictures to.
• Stereolab - Suggestion diabolique: take the bull by the horns
• Daedelus - Thus the whirligig: achingly intelligent
• u-ziq - mushroom compost: I am a party girl here is my soundtrack, systolische phase

What I love is the interpretations they suggest. And most of the times you can understand what the tag means listening to the song.

And then two things I don’t like about the last (otherwise great) last.fm player update (1.1.0.0):

1. As far as I know, I can no longer see this information (tags for the currently playing song) directly in the player. That was, as you’ve seen, a good source of joy
2. You can no longer construct a multiple artist radio either in the web or the radio player. I cannot see a reason for this, as you can still do it with a url (Note: this link will try to open your last.fm player, if you have one, and will tune in a radio based on all the artists mentioned in this post). Hope they are not deprecating this feature, as I have something soon to release based on that

For the underground, I always buy a 10 journey ticket. I never have a look at how many of them I spend. It always gives me a (punishment) beep when the ticket is over, and I have to go back to buy a new one. How about giving me a (warning) beep when I use the last trip so I can buy the new one in advance?

As my rss reader doesn’t still forget feeds for me, I’ve had to force a total amnesia. I’ve done it before, but now I’m not going to get my opml back. I’ll add just the ones I remember…

Happy new formatted year!

Update:Might be time to switch rss reader too, as now google reader “provides a trends page filled with graphs and widgets that keeps you up-to-date on your own usage.” (via o’reily radar).

Ah, those traces of interaction…

Beans (the one i know) is a hip hop mc, formerly a member of the great Antipop Consortium.

(The) Beans are a canadian post rock band, which I didn’t know before. They’re good if you’re into do make say think and bands like that.

It seems like last.fm is not so sure about that difference, as they give credit for Tired Snow (a recent record by The Beans) to Beans, the mc.

But far from annoying me, it gave me a magic moment yesterday when I was recommended Miko, a song from that record. I spent the whole three minutes waiting to hear how the abstract avant garde rap of the former would fit with the canadian instrumental post rock of the latter.

Still thinking…

Zach Lieberman will be presenting (talking and performing) his work tomorrow at the University Pompeu Fabra. He will be talking, among other things, about openframeworks, his “open-source library to help other artists produce works through coding.” in c++, which I’m totally in love with.

Details:
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ink & c++ for dinner
a performance and talk by zach lieberman
Friday 15th, 6pm

Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Auditori Edifici França

Estació de França
Passeig de Circumval·lació, 8
08003 Barcelona
Bus: 14, 39, 51
Metro: L4 (Barceloneta)

Map

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See you there!

I’ve been thinking about differences that different technologies (as such, regardless of what we do with them) offer in user experience. They’re like different materials:

• DHTML = Paper: Transparent, accesible, malleable, fragile
• Flash = Plastic: Vectorial, fluid, “stretchable”, shiny…
• Java = Stone: Heavy, unchangeable (no right click), exclusive…

Usually, the choice of the technology to use for a project is based in parameters which are previous to the design of the experience (availability, developer skills, “client wanted this”…)

I wonder if we could take into account those intrinsic charasteristics when we think of the end user. In print design you would choose different materials depending on the effect that you want to cause…