“GOD” ON LAST.FM

An interesting byproduct of the “semantic web” movement is that like much of the internet and open source programming, amateurs, hobbyists, and professionals (in spare time) have been expected to contribute work to this notion of machine-tagging the data that make up our World Wide Web and the internet as a whole.

While browsing through descriptions of bands on last.fm, I found a group that had the tag “god” applied to it, and I don’t remember who; it was more the surprise that it occured to someone to label a piece of music in that way.  The result is that a few hundred people have marked music that they
think is the absolute best of the best, and that’s not a bad thing.

The funny thing about it, to me, is to see just what music last.fm users think qualify for the tag, and frankly, like a wiki vandal, if I wanted to completely ruin things, I could start tagging music I know and believe is crappy with the “god” tag myself, but most of me wants that tag to work out, so I thought of a few things that belong in the tag and … tagged them.

Last.fm can create virtual radio stations of sorts from these tags, my and other users’ personal profiles, and the calculated relationships between others’ profiles based on calculations, so the idea of having a channel instantly calculate a playlist of what a lot of people think is absolutely the best music of the best is an amazing feat.  This isn’t just a single person’s opinion…

Now, last.fm made connections to tags like “praise and worship” and “prayer” and I suppose that’s to be expected, but a majority of the entries represented in the tag are not Christian or religious music outfits, and in fact, I don’t recognize any of the groups in the list as such.

The reigning champion of the “god” tag at this writing is David Bowie.

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Thank you for the comments.

organic_gaming was talking first about how extortionate the notion of cell phone insurance is- there’s no way my cell phone costs anywhere remotely near $200 to create; and second he talked about something he wrote in his blog, about considering defecting from Xanga because of other blog sites’ features.

Xanga have added a lot of features that, to me, seem to be clearly meant to compete with the decor and features of MySpace.

I’m not ungrateful for the sudden picture space, and the flash player for audio so I don’t have to ask people to click links that touch my own server, which may or may not be on at the time…

It seems that the only reasons to choose any blog over another are the feature set offered (I don’t use most of what Xanga offers even in the free account) and the search function, the latter is a bit more important if you expect more than your circle of friends to see your work.  I get the impression that most people blog where their friends are, so to speak, though.

Organic_gaming was thinking about leaving Xanga for an engine that lets you back up your blog (Xanga will, if you pay for Premium) and offers better editing features.

Me?  I’d consider a Ruby on Rails/Typo blog if I didn’t think I’d lose what few readers I have; moving your blog gives you the “new phone number/address” problem where you suddenly have to contact all these people in some way so they know to find you, and you never seem to rememeber everybody.  We’ll call it slight discomfort in the name of familiarity.

A second thought of mine is the notion of using a kind of RSS aggregator to catch the feed from my own Xanga page here, and then create a way for readers to leave me comments without having to get a Xanga account, as if it’s that difficult to use the “send me an email” link.

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The ladies at work wanted to try and create a regular coworker’s outting, a way to unwind and otherwise have fun seeing each other outside of the context of the headset and cubicle.  The first try was called “doggie play day” and had six visitors.

Since I live in an apartment and can’t have pets, I brought Ein, pictured left.

Hope everything is going okay with everyone.

See you next time.