Social Mashup

A bear with a sore head!

I’ve been using and very much enjoying LastFM for just over a year. Recently I noticed play back cutting out after an hour or so, and this silly graphic appearing to punctuate the irritating silence.

I thought the designers had gone insane, radio is generally a passively consumed media so the idea of wandering off, and LastFM demanding some kind of ongoing attention seemed incredibly poorly though out (dare I say vacuous).

Now take a look at that “Subscribe” link. Well, I thought I was a subscriber, perhaps not a paying subscriber, but certainly a loyal site member and consumer none the less.

Follow that link, we arrive at the page below and the “real intention is revealed”. Uninterrupted radio now costs three quid (vernacular for Pounds Sterling) a month. So, look again at the picture above. Are people concerned that I’ve been eaten by said famed bear, am listening to Internet radio whilst dusting the cat, or in reality are the site providers using “nuisance tactics” to drive fee paying subscriptions?

It makes me think seriously about purchasing one of the many dedicated Internet radio appliances (from about 40 manufactures last time I counted). Some even integrate playback with Pandora, so I could easily retain the ‘played track history’ elsewhere, all with no interruption and no recurring fees (beyond the initial outlay on the physical device itself).

I think it’s really interesting that LastFM are broadcasting over CBS networks in New York, San Francisco, LA and Chicago (as announced earlier in the week). That’s great, a fascinating ‘cross over’ story from Internet radio to traditional broadcasting (of course CBS own LastFM). However, I’m ‘dismayed’ at the decision to implement interruptive ‘tactics’ that make no sense in such a delivery model on the Web. And seriously guys, when did a certain type of icon become prestigious (bullet 4 below)?

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Another cool way to enrich and contribute

Conceptually brilliant, an interesting way to expand and enrich page content on behalf of ‘other users’. I can immediately see parallel enterprise side implementations to enrich corporate Intranet and Knowledge Management tools.

Watch the video, install the necessary and give it a try…You can share entries through Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and Google profiles.

Very smart!

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Many permutations lead to Rome

In the reconstitution of this blog and indeed the exercise of porting out from Drupal to Word Press I gave some thought to the (age old) issue of content duplication and what we have come to know and love as ‘canonical URLs’. To give a really simple explanation, search engines can resolve multiple URLs to the same actual content page e.g. stevenimmons.org, www.stevenimmons.org, stevenimmons.org/index.php (and so on)… ..Continue reading..

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