"We did it! Emergent Music is finally up and running! Check it out... and to get a good idea of what we're trying to do, please see my greatly-expanded open letter to the EM community."
Gary Robinson of Emergent Music sent me a personal email to answer the questions I had relating to the service. He posted a rather lengthy reply from a DG posting in which he explains the features of EM and answers my questions as well.
On Amazon-like recommendation filtering:
"...We decided not to use those algorithms in EM. Or, more accurately, we plan to bring them in later, but they will only be an enhancement, not a centerpiece. (We have a new CF technology built on information theoretic principles that we will bring in at that later time.)"
OK, I guess personally what I'm really after is someting more like MovieLens, not Amazon's "people who bought this, also bought this..." feature. Yeah, sure they may have bought it, but did they enjoy it. That's what I'm after.
"...we are keyed towards groups of people coalescing around genres, and people making recommendations to each other in those genres."
Sounds cool. But can I have the recommendations served up to me....? Say via RSS?
"...We have a Userland Radio weblog set up but haven't turned it on yet that automatically picks up the best recommendations and publishes them. We'll turn it on soon; eventually we will generate one for every genre."
Self-reproducing, mobile cuteness memes Here's a gallery of ASCII-art anime characters, suitable for emailing to your pals with your DoCoMo phone. The cool part is, the ASCII isn't random, it's ANSI-standard C code that can be compiled to generate more copies of the same picture.LinkDiscuss(Thanks, U.J. Foobar!) posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52 [via boingboing] Self-reproducing...that's just too cool! I know there's a whole science devoted to this form of crypto, i just can't think of the name at the moment.
6:55:29 PM
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