Mixcloud recommends…

I haven’t done a music recommendations post for a good while – but stumbling upon Mixcloud the other day, it occurred to me this site has a lot of potential.

It’s an attempt to converge radio broadcasts, mixtapes and podcasts into the one search-friendly environment – and it works pretty well for finding stuff you haven’t heard yet.

Big media organisations can draw on the knowledge of professional researchers and experts, who will suggest suitable music for audio or visual packages.   Trying to find an equivalent to this wisdom isn’t easy online, albeit searching LastFM for other people who share some of your tastes, and Amazon’s Listmania! lists can both help point you in interesting directions.

Mixcloud offers similar help – just search for an artist you know (you may need to filter the results, using the tabs above) and you’ll find plenty of mixtapes where that artist has been shoehorned amongst others – sure there’s no guarantees that everything will be useful, but I got some interesting results when searching for Serge (Gainsbourg) - including a few French psychedelia artists I’d never heard of before.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, mind – but there’s plenty of potential in here for most tastes.

Spectator vs Carter-Ruck: bravery or bandwagonry?

So The Spectator is first to peep above the parapet on the story that will not be gagged: #Trafigura.

Gallus Alex Massie has chosen to take those legal bullies on, after taking stock of the wave of outrage expressed across the social media.  A calculated risk no doubt.

I find it interesting, though, that he chose to attack the BBC for not (at the time of writing) having run a story on this (they since, of course, have).

Had Alex done a little research he would know that the BBC were are in the process of being sued for libel having previously reported on this waste scandal, broadcast on Newsnight, on 13 May 2009.

You can hardly accuse them of not having done their part.

Meanwhile, a quick search of trafigura site:spectator.co.uk shows that the Specator’s interest in this story spans as far back as….today. 

Now that’s a smart bit of bandwagonry.

Death of the mogul, not the dynasty

Last week, John Gapper reported (in the FT) on the underreported death of Reinhard Mohn, founder of publishing behemoth Bertelsmann.

The piece strikes an elegiac note, revisiting the well established old media struggling to come to terms with new media meme.  But two more recent stories would tend to suggest that the era of the mogul are far from over.

Yesterday brought us news that Google’s plans to create its own Library of Babel are being opposed by Angela Merkel.  The extent to which this old school protectionist step was inspired by her good friend, and heir to the Bertelsmann dynasty Liz Mohn, can hardly be ignored.

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s Organ Grinder, Peter Preston gave us an insight into just how James Murdoch’s influence has informed the proposed Times+ online subscription platform, toward implementing a Berlin wall round the News Corp empire.  Murdoch Junior’s tirade against the BBC and Ofcom in August have led some to  the conclusion that a Faustian pact has already been signed between the Murdoch empire and the Tories with a view to carving up the future media market.

Others may speculate, but one thing’s for sure - there’s life in the old media dynasties yet.

Moral panic on the interweb, part #963

Andrew Keen continues his crusade against the amoral and amorphous blob consuming us all, in today’s Telegraph.

While I find his particular brand of techno-pessimism a welcome counterweight to some of the techno-utopianism that exists out there, one or two aspects of today’s polemic (issues he raises time and time again) merit taking issue with. Namely:

As Clay Shirky argued last weekend at Ryerson University, the Internet has so confused and collapsed the distinction between audience and author that the ethical rules of the old economy no longer work. The old dichotomies of content and advertising, once governed from above by all-powerful, centralised organisations like the FTC and News Corp, have been made increasingly redundant by the internet.

The implied monopoly on ethical rules embraced by the ‘old economy’ frankly doesn’t line up with this surfer’s day-to-day experience, neither of new media nor old.

To imply that the Internet is a moral wasteland seething with swivel-eyed, loony-tune demagogues, and free-riding spongers, does a severe dis-service to the millions who contribute their well-reasoned opinions, expertise and knowledge.

There is also an implicit golden-ageism about the old media here, which just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps Andrew might further elaborate on just how ‘all-powerful’ the FTC has been historically, with regard to enforcing ethical standards on the US broadcasting media. For example, Commercial Alert, and Sourcewatch both provide several examples and research demonstrating the creep of product placement into news programming there.

Meanwhile, in the UK we have seen a clamour for reform of the Press Complaints Commission. A range of voices from outwith the old media (MediaWise) and within (The Media Standards Trust) are now using the Internet to mobilise, and hold old media to account on policing their ‘ethical rules’. These groups wouldn’t exist if everything in the garden were rosy.

While it is true that the online medium brings with it ethical challenges, to frame the changes we are living through as, in effect, barbarians storming the gate, does no credit either to the new media, nor the old.

Open communication and transparency should be at the centre of media standards. And online can be a very effective platform upon which to develop these virtues.

New delicious features – where’s the feed?

Last week Delicious announced some new options, the most useful of which falls within Search refinement and graphing features.

Having had a quick play, it occurs that – yes, this is a welcome move, both from a visual and ease-of-search perspective.  The new feature lets you filter down to results saved in the last five minutes, rather than the previous day – which is welcome as far as real-time newsgathering is concerned.

What’s not so useful, however, is that it doesn’t seem possible (I assume, based on several tries) to lift an RSS feed from your search results – the generic feed which shows up once your search results are returned/filtered is of little help when narrowing your focus.

If you are looking to keep uptodate with delicious saves as they are made without making use of a delicious widget in iGoogle (and the like), it seems you have to continue down the manual, delicious/tag/<tag name> route.  But this also means (I assume) that you can’t combine a search term with a tag – which seems a bit like a missed opportunity.