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I've had an iPod for a little over a week now, and I've been working pretty diligently to rate every song I hear and trying to make sure all the metadata is correct. I've even started tinkering with tagging songs using things like :dreamy, :goofy, :energy, :calm in the comments field for use with Smart Playlists. (Yeah, I know about TuneTags, but the psuedo-XML in song comments bugs me, as does the somewhat buggy behavior of the last version of the program I tried.)
By this point, I've managed to cram about 3400 songs from our CD collection into it. (So much for the marketing!) With my efforts so far, a “Good Music” Smart Playlist selecting for 3-stars and above gives me around 415 songs. This doesn't count the songs I've rated with 1-star, which get deleted from the iPod periodically. Also, I've yet to get a significant proportion tagged with special comments, so mood-based and concept-based playlists are far off until I get a better tool for letting me quickly and lazily tag songs.
So, this morning on the way into work I fired up my “Good Music” playlist on random for the first time, and I was amazed at how good the selection was. Yes, I rated these songs, so I should know they're good--but so far, I've had all 3400 songs on shuffle and have been alternating between listening and rating, skipping songs I wasn't in the mood for, and canning songs right off the bat with a 1-star rating. So up until now, my rotation has been an okay experience.
However, hearing that mix of consistently high rated songs was an unexpectedly good experience. What occurred to me as I rounded the last stretch of I-75 into Detroit this morning is that this metadata and these Smart Playlists on shuffle amount to an attempt to tickle myself. Ever try that? For the most part, it doesn't work. Sure, you know where you're ticklish--but if it's your hand trying to do it, you're expecting it and the tickle doesn't happen.
I'm probably stepping too far into breathless pretentiousness with this, but it makes me want to think further about machine learning and intelligence. Yeah, Smart Playlists are a very, very rudimentary form of intelligence, but it's good enough to tickle me with a music mix--which is a very real bit of value added to my life.
I wonder how much further this tickling-myself metaphor can be taken? That is: take a machine endowed with information I produced, apply some simple or slightly complex logic with a bit of random shuffle, and feed it back to me to see if it makes me experience it with some novelty. Someone's got to already be on top of this as a research project. That, or it's an idea obvious or dumb enough only to appeal to me.
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So I finally got myself an iPod, thanks to The Girl.
Through various twists of replacement policy and iBook promotional antics, somehow she ended up with two 20GB 4G iPods, both of which she's been planning to sell off on eBay to end up with some cash and an iPod Mini. Well, it finally occurred to me this weekend that I needed to buy one of those iPods.
Lately, I've been only been listening to streaming radio at work, since I don't really have the hard drive space on my PowerBook for music, and loading up the work PC with MP3s is pretty unpalatable. I miss the days when I had a 40GB library at work, but between company policy where I am now and having lost that whole library in a hard drive crash back then, I'm hesitant to go there again.
Enter the iPod. I was reminded of its presence in The Girl's office, still boxed up and shrink-wrapped, at a moment when I was thinking about podcasting and thinking about my lack of hard drive space. So, I gave in and snapped it up.
Thus far, I'm pretty happy. Sure, I'd been looking at the larger capacity models that came with a dock and remote, but this one was the right price at the right place and the right time. I was also lucky that she had an iTrip she was selling that just happened to work satisfactorily for playing MP3s in my car - something that's been a bit of a quest of mine for years. While it's true I do have an in-dash Blaupunkt MP3 CD player in my Ford Focus now, it's also true that 20GB certainly outweighs 700MB.
The few snags I've run into so far mostly have to do with the fact that it seems like my desired usage pattern of the iPod isn't quite supported. See, I don't want to have a massive library on my PowerBook, to be synched in part onto my iPod. I have a library on a file server at home, and I want to use the iPod alternately as a music store away from home for iTunes on my PowerBook and as an MP3 player while I'm driving. I don't want any music at all on my PowerBook. Problem is, though, the iPod isn't quite a first-class citizen in iTunes. Party Shuffle doesn't work, and I had a few problems with making sure metadata (like ratings and last played date) made it into iTunes.
Oh yeah, and I wish they'd turn down the wheel sensitivity way down when setting a song's rating. At present, it's just a bare millimeter of a finger's twitch to leap from 1 to 5 stars. Might just be me.
But, for the most part, I'm very happy to have my own music at work again, and the potential of tinkering with smart playlists and podcasts are exciting to me. That, and the fourth-generation iPod is just an elegant, slick joy to hold.
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The future of syndication that folks at Web2.0 are professing is really structured around information organization and access. It's about people who are addicted to content, people who want to be peripherally aware of some discussions that are happening. It is not about people who use these tools to maintain an always-on intimate community. There is a huge cultural divide occurring between generations, even as they use the same tools. Yet, i fear that many of the toolmakers aren't aware of this usage divide and they're only accounting for one segment of the population.
Source: apophenia
- a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture
As I was writing about falling for the podcasting hype, I'd mentally queued up some ideas for something further relating to my growing addiction to NPR and news in general. Danah's writing about youth and feeds and intimate communication versus institutional communication resonates well with what I've been tossing around in my head.
When I was in high school, around about the time Ross Perot was getting into the presidential race, I remember putting a little item on my to-do list in my brand new day planner:
Read the newspaper, watch the news.
I must've been, what, 16 years old? I suppose that would have made me one of the youths Danah's talking about, albeit of an earlier generation of online communicators. At the time, the bulk of my disposable income earned as a grocery store bagger was spent on music CDs, gas, and the occasional upgrade to my Commodore Amiga. I didn't even know was NPR was, though I knew there was this thing they did with news on the radio. But newspapers and talk on the radio were things that my grandparents paid attention to, if anything.
The only reason I put that item on my to-do list--in fact, the only reason I even had a day planner with a to-do list in the first place--was because, according to the teachers trying to prepare me for college, this was what grownups did. Planning your days and reading the news were things that adults did, and if I wanted to be an adult, I should get with the program. And I wanted to get with the program, but I really didn't see the point yet.
However, I did live most of my social life online. Now, that needs a bit of qualification: Of course, I am a big geek and many of my kind spend their days living in Mom's basement talking to men pretending to be 14-year-old girls. But, back when I was first getting online, the main gateway for access was the dial-up BBS, preferably one that was a local call to your area code and prefix. What that meant is that most of the people I was chatting with online were within a 16-year-old's parentally condoned driving radius.
So, I never lived in the basement, and I did actually get out quite a bit. The only real strange bit was that very few of my social group went to school together--and actually, most of us were misfits in school, some counting the minutes till we could get back to each other. Having just finished Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe (read on my Treo 600, my comm, no less), I can totally grok the tribes. Mine was as small as an area code or two, rather than a time zone, but I had a tribe. Still do, even though we've since dispersed across many, many area codes. Now there's LiveJournal and Xanga, among other tribe-building technologies.
But lately, in the past few years, I've been changing. I'm only 29 now, but I've learned what a day planner is for and my to-do list is crucial; I know enough about the news on TV not to watch it much, yet I pull in enormous volumes of news from online sources and magazines. And, as I wrote earlier, NPR is now the only station on my radio dial.
When I was 16, the presidential race was a curiosity about which I felt vague guilt for not knowing more. But, this time around I'm giving it an attention and range of emotion akin to a rabid sports fan during playoffs. I lost sleep over whether or not my voter registration was up to date with my correct address. I do realize that for many, many reasons this particular presidential race is historic. But I'm a johnny-come-lately--there've been historic presidential races before: history didn't start because I started paying attention.
What's happened is that I've changed. If I could time-travel and stop by to say hello, my high-school-self would probably admire who I am now, but wouldn't quite understand me. He'd get the half-dozen IRC windows I have open, and the handful of IM windows I'm floating at any particular moment, but I doubt he'd get the lure of my news aggregator in the background. I loved Jesus Jones at the time, but I didn't really know what it meant to be an Info Freako.
What changed in me? I'm not quite sure. I'm sure there's something going on with hormones and the few grey hairs I have now. But I think it has something to do with actually starting to become a grownup. That is, I'm paying taxes, I'm acting in the world, I have responsibilities, and I've left the shelter of my parents' house. All the way from elementary school through college, I was on rails, and there wasn't much I needed to know other than what they were teaching to get by. Now, though, I'm off the rails, and I feel I need all the information I can get, just to figure out how to navigate.
Maybe it's become obsessive, but I don't want to miss any vital data that will help lead me toward my bliss, to grow up without growing old. And I know that, however small, my actions have consequence in the world, so I want to understand. I am a member of a civilization. I think I get that now.
So, anyway, if anything I'm just underscoring with my own experience that usage divide between youth and older info freako adults Danah wrote about. I've been on both sides of it now, I think.
Where I think I disagree a bit is about trends: she asks if this Info Freako style of massive feed consumption will be relevant beyond the Web 2.0 crowd of today. As an early adopter of a technologically-driven social life, I would have to guess that the current generation will produce some even more obsessive Info Freakos than the oldsters around today.
Because, if my own experience is any guide, we start off using the technology to talk to each other in tribes. However, as (or, I guess, if) we grow up and become fully acting members of our civilization, we turn to the same sorts of tech to converse with the civilization itself. Whether that will take the form of massive feed consumption, I don't know, because I have to assume the tech will be very much changed by then. I can see the intimate communication habits progressing to civic and national and global communication habits, even in myself.
The problem, though, is that once you start making ventures out of your tribe, you start running into the limits of your neocortex. Communication must necessarily lose its intimacy and give way to group-to-group and one-to-many conversations. That's where I see feeds coming in to supplement IM and email--though I certainly hope by then that there's a lot more intelligence behind feeds and microcontent routing and user interface, a lot of the principles will be the same.
But, in any case, I think we're in for some interesting history coming up, as more youths used to texting each other take up roles as members of civilization.
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So I had an idea for a quick podcasting listening hack on the way into work this morning. Check it out:
Take one list of RSS feeds in OPML.
Throw in a bit of XSLT.
Combine using xsltproc to make a playlist that works in iTunes.
And, oh yeah, I just happen to have an xsltproc web service laying around, so:
Supply a URL to your OPML in this form.
Get a freshly-built playlist.
Now, this has been barely tested and is the product of a ten-minute hacking session. There are likely an enormous number of things wrong with this. That said, iTunes does seem to open the playlist happily, and it looks like only new streams are added with repeated openings of the playlist.
You will want to be careful to ensure that your OPML is valid XML (mine wasn't, on initial export from iPodderX - escape those freaking ampersands in URLs already!), and I have no idea what would happen if any of the RSS feeds in your subscriptions turn up invalid.
Have I mentioned that, despite their unforgiving and sometimes fragile nature, I love XML technologies?
If this looks useful, maybe I'll work it over a bit more and pair it up with some python to handle actually downloading the MP3s and torrents.
Update: Oh yeah, and I'm expecting this will be useful with an iTunes smart playlist crafted along these lines:
Date Added in the last 1 days
Play Count is less than 1
Update #2: Another use I just found for this playlist, is on my Xbox Media Center. I generate this playlist via cronjob every few hours, and store it on an SMB share accessible to the XBMC. Voila! Listening to podcasts on my stereo system via the Xbox. Yeah, nothing big, just kind of nifty.
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So, over the last day or so, I've found myself falling for the Podcasting hype.
Yeah, yeah, I know -- I listened to and read Maciej's audioblogging manifesto (and, yes, that's a link to the text version, which kind of helps support the argument therein) but I think the addition of portable digital audio players and RSS feeds with enclosures to the mix changes things.
The whole audioblogging thing has seemed incredibly stupid and annoying to me, since my experience of it so far has mostly consisted of this: I navigate first to a text blog entry, click on a link to an MP3, then stare at the screen as the thing plays. Being a high-bandwidth Info Freako, a feeling of time wasted comes upon me pretty quickly. I can speed read and I want to get through this quickly, but I can't speed listen. I want to throw a bookmark at del.icio.us if I like it, but I can't select any text. Getting a bit bored, I start thinking about how maybe I might want to remix this crap, make a funky beat out of all the utterances of “um”, “ahh”, and “err”.
So, yeah, this sucks. Not picking on any particular audio blogger or post -- because they're almost all like this -- but I want that 4 minutes of my life back.
But the thing is, I'm a news radio junkie. I abandoned listening to music over the air almost seven years ago, so when I'm not listening to MP3 CDRs, my car tuner is almost perpetually locked on NPR. I listen to people jabbering at me at almost all times while I'm driving. And at work, I mix listening to my MP3s with streaming talk, news, and old sci-fi radio stations.
The difference here is that radio doesn't demand much of my attention. I'm usually doing something else while I'm listening, like driving or working. I don't have to navigate to anything, I don't have to provide any feedback or make any decisions--I just have to let it stream into my head. The lower mental demands of audio and a lack of necessary interaction dovetail nicely with multitasking.
So, in come iPodderX and friends. They're feed aggregators specifically built to slurp down audio enclosures and sync them up to audio players like the iPod. The idea is that, when you leave home, you take the digital audio player with you, loaded up with your own personal radio programming. Not having an iPod, I've been queuing these aggregated audio posts up in iTunes at work, and I've been playing around with burning CDRW's for use in my car's in-dash MP3 player. Once I get a headphone adapter for my Treo 600, maybe I'll start listening to them on there.
With this switch of perspective, I think I'm falling for the hype. The key is to get out of the way: aggregate, queue, and play in the background. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of awful crap out there, and lots of dorks eating breakfast and lipsmacking into the microphone as they blab (this is me, shuddering)--but as the number of podcasters expand, we will start to hear some blissful hams showing up with things worth listening to.
I'd like to do something, but I doubt I have the time or insight to produce something worth listening to on a regular basis. Adam Curry suggested doing things like a daily quote, jokes, or skits--short, good things have value. (Pete's encounter with frozen pizza instructions on Rasterweb Audio made me snort a bit.)
The first thing that comes to my mind are these old sci-fi radio broacasts to which I'm addicted. While I have written stories of my own, I wonder how much public-domain or Creative Commons licensed content is out there available? Could be fun to do some readings and a maybe do a little low-budget foley work. Of course, there's the hosting and bandwidth to worry about, though I suppose BitTorrent could help if the aggregators support it (and they should!)
In any case, I think the podcasters are on to something here. I'll be listening.
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