I'm not much of an audiophile, to be honest, and there are lots of other people who will get more deeply into music-blogging and playlist-sharing than I'm likely to. But the process at work here is deeply fascinating to me, and generalizes to other realms. Every kind of digital experience can thrive in the virtuous cycle of the blogosphere: use it, capture part of it, link to it, write about it, search for it, read about it, aggregate it, rinse, lather, repeat.
Udell quotes a post in which Jefferson Provost (correctly, in my view) observes that since "consolidation has turned music radio into a steaming pile of crap", word-of-mouth recommendation is pretty much all that serious listeners have got left to find the good stuff. I wholeheartedly agree.
I've been collaborating with Lucas and Alf (okay, rather coaxing them into working things out) to make the experience tighter among Winamp (the player I use), Webjay, and feedroll so that bloggers can easily post their finds, promoting good free music and musiclogging itself at the same time. Once things get nice and usable enough I think we'll be close to having a decent model case for the open, collaborative media filtering and recommendation networks of the future. I'll probably post more about it tomorrow.
[Seb's Open Research]
Looking forward to seeing what happens when Lucas, Seb and Alf get together.
[Marc's Voice]