I edit therefore I am

I’ve read a very good article three days ago called An Early Personalized Recommendation System - Firefly It’s an old article about Firefly … ie. the first recommandation system company. The article is well written and well documented.
Slawski the guy behind the blog made me discover (trough the article quoted below) Paul Lamere’s blog (I am nearly confused by the fact that I didn’t find it before !) who just wrote an extraordinary article about Music recommandation plug-in for Itunes called : "The Recommenders Remoras" (just quoted by Greg)

Here is an extract :

One thing that iTunes does not do very well is give new music recommendations. [...] Poor recommendations has driven a whole industry of music recommenders that work with iTunes. [...] These recommenders run as iTunes plugins, sidebars and tag-alongs. When you start iTunes, these programs also start up - they keep tabs on what you are listening to, and use this data to generate recommendations for you. [...] These recommenders are like remoras (aka suckerfish) to the iTunes shark. [...] By attaching itself to a host such as a shark, a remora benefits by using the host as transport and protection and also feeds on materials dropped by the host. The recommender remoras benefit from iTunes reach onto millions of desktops and feed on the opportunities left by iTunes’ poor recommender.

W.Slawski pointed in his post to another article about music recommendation called "Better than we know ourselves" This article decribed and critized the main Music RS (i.e Last.fm / Pandora / Paul Lamere’s project at Sun !!! Incredible Project !!! / as well as MusicIP ….etc).

The article starts with "MUSIC IS TRIBAL IN ITS ESSENCE" but quickly focuse on technology (too bad, despite the fact that it’s a huge point)…. Actually it’s one argument in favour of U.[lik]
that seems to be more and more dominant in my thinking.

One of our board member wrote a booked called "The end of TV" (it’s in french) and what strucked me while reading the book is the Tribal aspect of TV. TV is what you talked about at the coffee break (actually it’s not TV but what was on TV) …. but TV is dead so what will we be talking about ?

Entertainment is about entertaining yourself … spending some time in another world …. but it’s also about bringing a part of this world in your social life. This probably explains the success of Tv-shows (maybe with the fact that cinema is overproducing and that cables scatered the audience).

U.[lik]
is about all entertainment … and is Tribal by essence !

In conclusion I agree with Lamere, Recommendation System in music are remoras … they are about direct plug-in to your consumption stream which destroys the entry barrier. If it’s automatic, it can replicated. Building a database of content and a database of taste is the crux to enable a real "tribality". I am not saying that Music RS are bad … I use U.[lik]
(for it mainly trough the video widget), Last.fm, Pandora and iLike while working…. but we need more to enable more social. Music is everywhere from Myspace to any blog and everything started with Napster … but we need to work on the next decade …. when all content will be ready for it.

RS for the rest of entertainement is not about counting automaticaly the number of times you played a song … it’s more subtile … it’s more tribal.

Thanks William.

PS: Pandora is a box / Last.fm is a radio / iLike is about me …. U.[lik] is about Tribal ;-))

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