My Own Pirate Radio

I’m interested in how people discover things: web pages, music, places to eat, other people to hang out with, so on and so forth. Here are two items in that vein that I recently stumbled upon:

1. Discovering music: I signed up a while back with Last.fm, and played around with it for a bit. It’s interesting, but somehow left me a little flat. Last.fm uses collaborative filtering to recommend music that people with similar tastes enjoy. It’s a Black Box approach: assume you will never satisfactorily model the human brain and instead, just map human behavior and draw inferences from that. Where it fails for me is that there isn’t enough randomness; song sequences are too similar. Subsequently I’ve heard a lot about Pandora, which takes a totally different approach and tries to model the “genetics” of music. So… the new thing is a mashup of the two services. I just signed up.

2. Discovering people: If you are considering or have tried online dating, take a look at TeamDating. They enable group dates. Seems smart to me… there’s safety, fun, and serendipty in numbers.

3. Meta: I found out about the Pandora/Last.fm mashup from TechCrunch, and TeamDating via Springwise. If you are into business innovation and haven’t seen Springwise, check it out. They seek out and write about innovative new businesses almost every day.

I’m fond of saying the cost of publishing is going to zero. Moving forward I’m revising this to, “publishing is free”. There are so many free publishing services out there now that it’s hard to imagine newcomers charging fees.

Here’s one a colleague just told me about: Lulu.com lets you publish books, CDs, brochures etc. for free. From their FAQ: “You can publish your work for free […] When someone wants to buy your content, Lulu handles the transaction and pays you the royalty you specified. Lulu takes a small commission when someone else buys your content.” There are many more out there like Lulu.

Let’s roll the clock forward a few years on these trends:

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Blogging for me is a hobby. I’ve only been doing it a short while, and it’s not my day job or something I try to promote. I’m pretty sure most of my readers are friends and family who humor me by visiting on occasion. So this morning, on seeing my blog traffic running at 10x its normal level, my initial reaction was fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Read the rest of this entry »

Announced today on the del.icio.us blog. In hindsight it was only a matter of time before one of the big three bought them.

Looksmart owns Furl. Who’s next, I wonder?

This post is about two experiments.

(1) The Search Engine Experiment is a web page for comparing relevance of various search engines. Try it; you might be surprised.

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In 1971, Nobel and Turing prize-winning economist Herbert Simon said, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Read more about Herbert Simon in wikipedia.)

Simon died in 2001. His decades-old insight holds real staying power: the so-called attention economy that he and others foresaw is increasingly becoming real. (It’s also becoming increasingly fashionable to talk about… search here and here. I feel so hip. Where do I sign up for Web 2.0?)

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