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the last seduction Last.fm joins Flickr and Myspace in creating a portrait of your real-life activities in the liminal realms of cyberspace 1 | 2 | |
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On Sunday the weekly charts are updated. I’ve played the album ‘Infinite Love Songs’ by Maximilian Hecker 23 times that week, and listened to ‘You Were Always The One’ by The Cribs 148 times. I look at my tags. ‘Breakup’. No shit, Sherlock. |
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Yeah, that’s right. The broken-hearted and online have a new weapon in their stalking/ self-torture armoury: Last.fm. ‘A man without a Myspace is like a man without a shadow’, a friend once said: now Last.fm joins Flickr and Myspace in helping create a digital footprint, a portrait of one’s real life activities in the liminal realms of cyberspace. Want to see what your ex is up to? No need to rely on gossip or hearsay, simply check through their Myspace comments, read their blogs, see if they’ve changed their ‘in a relationship’ status yet. scrobble me |
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| Who, I wonder, is this 20-year-old male with the awesome taste? | |||||||||
'folksonomy' Similarly, you can tag interesting web links on del.icio.us (a site which collects and categorises your bookmarks) with ‘feminism’ – and then click on the ‘feminism’ tag and see what other links have been classified under the same tag on that particular day. This method is sometimes referred to as a ‘folksonomy’ – (a combination of ‘folks’ and ‘taxonomy’, literally meaning ‘people’s classification system’) – because the tags are generated by large numbers of users, and are community-driven rather than designated by any kind of editorial overlord: a democracy, rather than a monarchy.
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let's play tag It’s impossible to be into music without getting involved in various spats about genres. Can a particular record be considered ‘emo’, when the word now describes music that’s strayed so far from its hardcore roots. Is IDM really a relevant term these days. How useful is it to classify this artist as ‘blip-hop’. And so on. Last.fm sidestep this issue by handing classification over entirely to its listeners. ‘We were wary of introducing genres because we had endless arguments’, explains Last.fm founder Martin S, ‘so we decided to let our listeners do the tagging.’ ‘We’re seeing some interesting things, though. Of course, lots of tags are based around genres, but there’s also a lot of stuff around mood and time of day. Music tagged ‘Saturday evening’ and music tagged ‘Sunday morning’ will be very different. Or music can be tagged as ‘Christmas’, or ‘Break-up’. Genreification basically existed so that music could be sold easier – so that brick and mortar record stores knew how to stack their shelves. But when you talk to the artists themselves, this has very little to do with the process of creation; and these tags are making explicit just how much mood has to do with the process of selection.’
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