staring into the distance::as far as our eyes can see

last.fm, web 2.0 and all that

There’s been a lot of stuff on web recently about Web 2.0. A lot of it is techno-hype, but behind it there is some substance. The web is starting to deliver some serious applications which otherwise would have to be installed into your home computer. This means that websites are no longer just displayers of information to the largely passive consumer, but actually enhance what your computer can do. (At least, while you’re connected to the internet: so non-broadband users can say goodbye at this point.)

For example, most of us will be familiar with Google’s Gmail service, which not only provides a web-accessed email service, but offers huge amounts of storage and super-fast searching facilities. The plus side of this is that you are no longer responsible for backing up your old emails, and it works better than most email clients for PCs. The minus side is that you’ve got Google looking at your emails, and doing with it what suits them. (Subject, of course, to their Terms and Conditions, which you have to agree to.) Some will have no problem with this, whilst others will have lots of problems with it. However, Gmail does provide a good example of the kind of extra functionality offered by the emerging web technologies, which Tim O’Reilly dubbed ‘Web 2.0′.

There are a few Web 2.0-type sites which have made their way into my internet habits. So here are some of them:

del.icio.us – online “Favourite bookmarks”, totally sorted, available irrespective of which computer you have to be on: you just log-in to your account.

wikipedia – yeah, well most of us have caught onto this one (and, yes, I think it qualifies as Web 2.0)

bloglines – I used to use an installed blog aggregator, but with two different computers (and three operating systems) which I habitually use, it was just too limiting. bloglines does it all for me, online.

bible.oremus.org – I guess there’s nothing Web 2.0 about this, as it’s been up for ages, but it means I don’t need to buy and install an online bible program for most of what I want. It offers search, lookup by chapter/verse and cut/paste. All in the NRSV which is the version I use anyway.

There’s a very good introduction to Web 2.0 on Bill Thompson’s section of the BBC Technology website.

One Web 2.0 site which has converted me recently is last.fm – it works by intelligently researching people’s listening habits using audioscrobbler, then supplying you with an internet news feed which contains tracks which occur on other people’s playlists who appear to have a similar music taste as yourself. To join, you need to install the audioscrobbler plugin for your media player which hunts through your audio libraries, then assesses your musical interests. The player then selects appropriate music from the last.fm catalogue and streams it to you – it’s a great way of finding out about new music. Security freaks should rest assured that there’s no gathering of any personal information – it’s all anonymous and statistical – neither is there any way that the scrobbler can get details of the nature of the source of the MP3 (ie. whether legal or, er, otherwise). It’s also easy to put in the name of a favourite artist into the player and get sourced with music that is similar in genre. For example, I’m currently listening to a feed similar in genre to “Gilles Peterson”, and very funky it is too.

Posted on Saturday, 1 April 2006 by Paul | Posted in geekism | 5 comments