"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past…"

Digital Culture

Indy custom radio

Via BoingBoing, Indy Custom Radio from Ian Clarke (the designer of Freenet). A music client which downloads freely-available MP3’s, plays them, and allows you to rank them. It takes these ranks, and (much like Amazon and Netflix progressive suggestions systems) the more you rank, the better the match for what you like.

I’m trying it out, and we’ll see how it goes. It will be interesting how quickly it can learn my preferences, as well as what sorts of music will actually pop up. Right now it doesn’t require any login or anything, so I’m guessing that the “preferences” are stored locally to the computer. Would be nice to be able to carry those prefs from one computer to the other, either via a login or some other authentication setup. Would also be interesting to increase the “folksonomic” quotient by making the preferences more transparent, and being able to actually view others “tags” or rankings. Also be interesting to see which songs are getting 5 stars, etc….could very easily to a top 50 from the data, using #’s of people who are ranking each song, combined with the actual 1-5 ranking.

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

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