September 27, 2004
What am I listening to?
Posted by bopuc at September 27, 2004 02:16 AM
Update: Until I find a more stable way of including the list, it's gone. Damn.
So following the boss's... er... endorsement(?), I've had to figure out a quick way to include last.fm / audioscrobbler data on a webpage...
Joi does a good job of explaining what that's all about.
Ok, so if you look in the left sidebar on my weblog, under the "most recent photoblog entries" block, you'll see what I am listening to in iTunes. Rather neat, methinks.
How this works quickly:
The audioscrobbler "app" runs in the background on my computer and tells my last.fm profile what iTunes is playing. last.fm provides an RSS 1.0 feed of the last 10 entries. With a bit of PHP, I grab and parse that RSS and display the list here.
Now this is only the tip of the iceberg! last.fm allows me to have a little "player" which would allow you all to actually "listen" to what I am listening to. (This is the feature I think you want me to implement for you, right Joi?) Also, once I have provided it with enough of an "idea" of what I am listening to, it will start suggesting stuff I may like to check out. Also, seeing stats on what I am listening to is way cool for me, but also for you. Gives you one more look at "me".
Of course, i didn't really need to know that Joi's favorite artist seems to be The Smiths... ;)
Anyways, furthermore, if you start digging in the stats, as more people join up and "populate the database with data", you get a VERY interesting picture of what is popular...
I agree with Joi. This is not only way cool, it is damn smart. These guys are sitting on something HUGE.
Comments
failing to load on your main page ! very cool though !
Listening »»
Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to fetch http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/rdf/history/bopuc. (HTTP Response: ) in /home/boris/www/bopuc.levendis.com/-shared/php/magpie/rss_fetch.inc on line 230
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/boris/www/bopuc.levendis.com/as.php on line 8
Posted by: steve at September 27, 2004 09:46 AM
Instead of parsing it everytime a user access the page ...
setup a script + cron to put the info into a DB every X seconds/minutes/whatever ... then call that info at your leisure ... had to do that for mm (frontpage).
Trying to parse it (an rss feed) everytime someone hit the page just killed us.
lemme know if you want more info.
Posted by: steve at September 27, 2004 06:09 PM
I knoooow... no time to do it though!
:)
Posted by: Boris Anthony at September 27, 2004 08:29 PM
Why I have the impression to be sucked away by marketers, that are slowly and gently putting us in their commercial matrix.
The more I see the social networks things, the more I want to escape the IT world. The more I think it goes the wrong way.
For example, I like to show what's playing on my computer right now to my friends, not to a commercial services, which analizes when I listen music at which part of the day, etc, and will send me targeted spams
:((( sorry to put that down, but it's really my feeling about it
Posted by: Karl at September 27, 2004 09:45 PM
karl - i told B that i had the same type of feeling today - interesting to read your comment.
Posted by: steve at September 27, 2004 10:23 PM
Karl, and steve for that matter. forget the commercial angst we are on your side. we crafted this baby out of our own pockets for 3 hard years. last summer nearly all our crew stayed in tents on our roof terrace so we could all live in one place and save money.
let's face it. what we are doing needs to happen. question is if you want it from napster/apple or from us? we want to give the power fo this to everybody and especially the people making music who are brilliant and also work in a normal job coz the music biz doesn't like what they are wearing on stage.
sorry for the sermon. but don't be scared of last.fm or you can never leave the house again. like I said thank god we are doing this and not uncle bill. good night.
Posted by: felix at September 28, 2004 06:06 PM
Felix.
Many thanks for your comment and I'm pretty sure it's done with honesty though now, I have a few questions ;)
1. The Web page is freely accessible, which means browsable by a marketing bot.
2. What happened if one day you decide to sell the whole thing, and I know a lot of projects where it has happened. Like a company with deep pockets decided to buy the community against a few millions, will you say "No !!!!" ;)
To answer your comment about apple and napster... Yeah but except if Apple spyware my iTunes, they don't know what is in my playlist and I'm not buying music at iTunes store as I'm not buying books at Amazon. :)
Posted by: Karl at September 28, 2004 07:11 PM