Quick thoughts on the music selection in Yahoo! Music Engine

Jeremy has a vibrant discussion going over at his blog about his experience with Yahoo! Music Engine, specifically the synchronization feature he recently used. (And there’s some discussion in the comments about the system requirements, but I’ll leave that to Jeremy’s blog for now.) Now that I’m working at Yahoo! and I’m using Windows again, I decided to give YME a shot.

High Fidelity First, I’ll admit — I can be a wee bit of a music snob, and I’ve committed quite a few of the base sins that music snobs commit (especially the sub-species of indie rock music snobs). I briefly DJ’ed at a station with barely enough broadcast wattage to get to the station’s parking lot, yet I took my 2-5am slot very seriously. When I ran a small music venue in college, I probably sneered with contempt as I turned down a bad local metal band who begged to play on an unbooked Tuesday night. And, of course, I’ve turned against obscure bands that have gotten popular because they are actually good. When I watch High Fidelity, too many of the “top 5 list” debates bring back very specific memories. When I’m at a party at a stranger’s house, I could care less about secretly peeking in the medicine cabinet — but I’m not above a quick scan of the spines of someone’s CD collection. (Despite all of the above, I have miraculously managed to avoid a vinyl obsession. When you’re engaged in a conversation with a fellow music snob and you assert that a truly obscure band sounds better on vinyl, time to recalibrate that music obsession).

That being said, I’ve found a lot of indie rock music-snob-worthy stuff on YME: Yo La Tengo, Built to Spill, Guided by Voices, Big Star, Calexico, Sonic Youth, Flaming Lips, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill. . . after a few days, I keep finding more stuff I like. I’m very impressed with the diversity.

In reality, I’m not that much of a music snob — on a recent out-of-town trip to a bachelor party with a bunch of equally discriminate music fans, I played a CD that I had labeled “Classic Rock Mix.” This one CD was my own distillation of The Eagles’ Greatest Hits and Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits into one rockin’ CD without the songs that I perceived as filler in the two larger works. After a brief period of indie-rocker indignation, the criticism subsided and there was nothing but appreciative toe-tapping and head bobbing. If “Jet Airliner” and “Take It Easy” don’t move you on one of those perfect summer days when everything is just right, then you’re simply not human.

Site to watch: ProgrammableWeb.com

I just subscribed to the ProgrammableWeb.com blog, described by the site’s creator (John Musser) here:

So what’s the point of this site? Although still euphemistically ‘in beta’, the goal is to create a home page for Web 2.0 developers. Content to include news, reviews, comparisons, and examples. Formal APIs, unofficial APIs, and accidental APIs are all fair game. Anything ‘programmatic’ that’s publicly accessible online from sources including Amazon, Google, eBay, Microsoft, del.icio.us, Feedster, UPS, EVDB, WeatherBug, indeed, Blogger and others. [Hey John, don’t forget Yahoo! Actually, John does list Yahoo’s APIs here. – CD]

Why? Because going From Web Page to Web Platform is a big deal. It’s immature and a bit ill-defined but full of potential. To particpate as developers requires understanding, and to do that means to know what the parts are and how they work.

Another way to look at this site is from its genesis: frustration. I wanted to get the ‘big picture’ view of web apis. So I picked-up what books I could find (like Iverson). Pretty good start. But not enough. Then where? Everywhere. Despite what seems like an infinite number of social/web2.0 blogs, sites and businesses, I still couldn’t find the ‘go-to’ place I wanted.

Although it’s in the early stages, the site looks promising and I agree with John that the web-as-platform is a HUGE deal (why else would I leave my CTO gig to take a job at Yahoo! with the word “platform” in the title?) I actually met John when I was at InfoWorld since he used to be involved in the NY CTO Club that I wrote about and visited regularly. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on his site.

The brutal efficiency of LinkedIn

David Berlind’s recent discussion of the merits of LinkedIn versus other services like Plaxo (David thinks LinkedIn is “winning” — and I agree) inspired me to surface a recent experience I had with LinkedIn that illustrates the importance of old-fashioned offline personal relationships — not just the direct personal relationships you are explictly aware of, but the implicit networks that are created by the associations you specify in an online profile. When this kind of information is laid bare and made easily searchable in the context of defined relationships, the brutal efficiency with which personal and professional networks can be navigated by connections outside of your first-degree network can be breathtaking.

In my particular case, I was contacted by someone who shared a trusted mutual connection with me who just happened to be interviewing someone who I had worked with in the past. I’m not even sure if this person is even on LinkedIn. I wasn’t this person’s boss, and I would have never been offered as an actual reference on a resume, but the person who contacted me for a reference noted that we worked for the same company and wanted to know my thoughts. Unfortunately, my comments weren’t positive. I just couldn’t give a positive reference without feeling like I was compromising myself and the trust of our mutual connection (this was kind of an extreme case — not much of a gray area on this one, which is rare in a world where I think almost anyone deserves a second chance and the benefit of the doubt).

Like your parents probably told you (or at least should have), reputation is your most important asset, and what people think about you can make or break opportunities in life. No technology will ever change that — but services like LinkedIn can be a mercilessly efficient means for a bad rep to follow you.

longbets.com: "the betting site for big thinkers"

Steven D. Levitt over at the Freakanomics blog (the companion blog to the book by the same name that is on my reading list) pointed me to the utterly fascinating longbets.org, which he described as “the betting site for big thinkers.”

In a nutshell, bettors publicly put real money on one side or the other of an issue with long-term implications, with the idea that one day the bets can be settled. So what are big thinkers betting on?

By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes. Craig Mundie, CTO of Microsoft, has $1000 on “yes,” and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has $1000 on “no.” (I guess we won’t be seeing the GooglePlane, but am I the only one who is a little alarmed that the CTO of Microsoft is saying we’ll have pilotless planes? Once you’ve seen a giant blue screen in Times Square. . . . )

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site. Dave Winer has $1000 on “yes,” and Martin Nisenholtz says, “no.”

By 2060 the total population of humans on earth will be less than it is today. (Kevin Kelly says “yes,” but there are no challengers yet).

Here’s another one without a challenger yet: By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks. Alex K. Rubin says “yes.” I’m not so sure about that one, but if I put up the cash, it would be up to my heirs to collect on that one if I won.

Reading the bets is good for some brain-stretching fun, and there are still plenty of predictions waiting for challengers. Winning is about pride, not money — all money is donated to charity.

Opera, the Amiga of web browsers

The news of the Opera browser’s tenth anniversary came from two different directions today: via Scott Rosenberg in my news aggregator, and via David Wheeler in IM. You can get a free registration code today from this page. I’ve tried Opera before but never quite switched. Still, it’s a reminder that IE and Firefox aren’t the only browser games in town.

I got the title of this post from one of my old InfoWorld columns. I think the larger point of that column (that Firefox could be the wedge that leads to the open source desktop) was lost by the (mildly) perturbed Opera fans who didn’t like being compared to Amiga, and the slightly more irritated Amiga fans who didn’t like being compared to Opera (see the comments from this post). I’ll admit that it was a superficial comparison, but as an aside within the column, it made a certain point.

The histories of both Amiga and Opera are extensively documented on the continually-amazing Wikipedia — well worth reading.

Backing up a Mac with rsync

If you want to avoid using all the goofy backup software that come with firewire drives these days, but you haven’t gotten around to reviewing the rsync man page and you’re starting to get a little worried about your backup situation on your Mac, this is the page for you. Rsync has always been a mainstay in my tools arsenal, but mostly on Linux and Solaris. This set of detailed instructions will clear any rsync cobwebs quickly, and throws in a few Mac-specific details to boot. I’m running my backup now. . . . looking good.

Wilco, Ken Waagner, and the future of music

Wilco is one of my favorite bands and has been since I picked up Being There sometime in the ’97 timeframe. If you take a look at my Last.fm artist charts and you skip past the Pink Floyd (no apologies, fellow indie rock fans — I enjoy it without irony), Wilco is in the top 20, and at various times, I’m sure Wilco has been on heavy-enough rotation in my household to be #1. (And yeah, my current Last.fm charts might suggest that I hold Prince in only slightly higher esteem than Buck Owens. And that would be right, but maybe it’s because I’ve seen Prince live three times and Buck only two.)

Continuing the speaker series here at Yahoo! that I mentioned last week when we had Mark Pauline with Survival Research Labs, on Friday we had Ken Waagner, the digital strategist behind Wilco.

I didn’t take detailed notes, but this excerpt from this Wired story by Lawrence Lessig gives you a sense of what Ken’s work has meant to the music industry at large:

The band Wilco and its quiet, haunted leader, Jeff Tweedy, is something different. After its Warner label, Reprise, decided that the group’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was no good, Wilco dumped them and released the tracks on the Internet. The label was wrong. The album was extraordinary, and a sold-out 30-city tour followed. This success convinced Nonesuch Records, another Warner label, to buy the rights back – reportedly at three times the original price. The Net thus helped make Wilco the success it has become. But once back in Warner’s favor, many wondered: Would Wilco forget the Net?

We’ve begun to see the answer to this question. Wilco’s Net-based experiments continue: the first live MPEG-4 webcast; a documentary about the band in part screened and funded via the Net; bonus songs and live recordings tied to CDs. Its latest album, A Ghost Is Born, was streamed in full across the Net three months before its commercial release. And when songs from it started appearing on file-sharing networks, the band didn’t launch a war against its fans. Instead, Wilco fans raised more than $11,000 and donated it to the band’s favorite charity. The album has been an extraordinary success – and was nominated for two Grammys.

Ken was the guy who put the song files for the unreleased Yankee Hotel Foxtrot up as Quicktime streams on a web server for fans to download for free while the record itself was in limbo. Aside from instigating a flurry of upset messages from his hosting provider (one of those $29.95 outfits) who were surprised at the massive surge of bandwidth usage, the success of the Internet-only (at the time, at least) album led to an appearance on Conan O’Brien. Ken said that Wilco was “the only band to ever play Conan O’Brien in support of a Quicktime stream.”

MAXIMUMROCKNROLL #133 coverThe discussion of major label music reminded me of an old issue of punker-than-thou zine MAXIMUMROCKNROLL (#133, June 1994) that gave a seriously grim and uncompromising punk rock view of major record labels. The image to the left says it all — signing with a major label is like putting a gun in your mouth — one can only assume that a pull of the trigger is imminent. The original issue has been preserved here.

A few additional links on Wilco and Ken Waagner:

Frederick Brooks / Ruby on Rails smackdown

Over at the 37Signals blog, there’s a post praising Frederick Brooks’ absolutely timeless Mythical Man-Month book (Wikipedia entry here), following up on a prior post espousing a “three people for version 1” philosophy, described as follows:

If you can’t build your version 1 with three people, then 1. you need different people, or 2. you need to slim down your version 1. Now, before I get yelled at, this doesn’t apply to every project, but I do believe it applies to the majority. And sure, if you are building a weapons system, a nuclear control plant, a banking system for millions of customers, or some other life/finance-critical system, then you may need a fourth.

But keep it in mind: three for version 1. Remember, it’s better to make version 1 half a product than a half-assed product. Three people will keep you closer to half a product and a cleaner, tighter, simpler base on which you can grow later.

The mysteries of the art of software development have always intrigued me, and I wrote about Frederick Brook’s amazing “No Silver Bullet” essay a couple of times in my blog and weekly column when I was at InfoWorld (man, that column about web services seems DATED now!) It’s one of those essays that’s worth re-reading every couple of years.

One of the comments to the post at 37Signals makes reference to the “No Silver Bullet” essay and puts it into the context of the Ruby on Rails phenomenon:

His essay called “No Silver Bullet” predicted that there would be no single significant development in programming that would increase productivity by an order of magnitude (whatever that means).

I’d be interested to hear JF/DHH’s opinion on that re: Ruby on Rails. Does RoR constitute an advancement of this type? Or, does RoR incorporate multiple technologies which collectively increase productivity (thus validating Brooks’ assertion).

Interesting question — I’ll stay tuned with my newsreader to see the response (and this isn’t really a Frederick Brooks / Ruby on Rails “smackdown,” I just liked the way that sounded as a title to this post!)

Incidentally, my friend and former Salon.com colleague Scott Rosenberg is currently deep in the process of writing a book that touches on some of the issues he wrote about in one of his Salon columns — can’t wait to read it.

PHP/Perl programming language mashup!

(Via O’Reilly Radar) My friend and former Salon.com colleague David Wheeler announced on Saturday that the new version of open source CMS Bricolage supports PHP templating via a new Perl module developed by George Schlossnagle. From the README:

This module provides a way to load a PHP interpreter into your Perl programs. The PHP interpreter then automagically has access to all of the modules and variables loaded into Perl. So PHP executed from Perl can use any Perl modules.

This is so cool and generally amazing (and it gave me the opportunity to debut the word “mashup” on this blog). When you’re remixing at the language level, you’re enabling all sorts of potential. Go Team Bricolage!

Fun with robots and fire at Yahoo!

Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs at Yahoo! This week has been a VERY cool work week. Closing out my first week, I attended an amazing lunch-time presentation by Mark Pauline, founder and director of Survival Research Labs, a talk put together by my boss Bradley Horowitz as part of a regular series here at Yahoo!

How to describe SRL? Well, you could look at the description on their site:

Survival Research Laboratories was conceived of and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

For me, it was just as interesting to look at the Flickr tag “srl” and the related tags:

The last performance SRL did was in downtown Los Angeles (covered nicely on BoingBoing), so if you look past the location tags (“downtown” and “losangeles”, of course), you’re left with art, performance, machines (like the deliciously insane Pitching Machine), robots, and fire. That sums it up to a certain degree, but it wasn’t your typical pretentious run-of-the-mill performance art. What Mark Pauline really is is an extraordinary hacker whose work has artistic implications, but with absolutely zero pretention. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from someone who others might describe as a “performance artist,” but he had the demeanor of a very thoughtful and determined hacker who really enjoyed working with people to build cool stuff and make it work. I left the session inspired and excited to get back to work. (It sure as hell beat the lunch-time “Getting the Most out of Microsoft Word” sessions offered at most companies.)

Of course, Yahoo! is doing a lot of hiring, so if you’re passionate and talented and this is the kind of thing that inspires you and gets your creative juices flowing, be sure to search the jobs database. If you need more encouragement, read this interview with Prabhakar Raghavan, our new head of research. I read this interview right after I accepted the offer from Yahoo! and it left me with one thought: get me there now.