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Citizen DAN, Prise Deux

AI^3 - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 04:36

Huzzah! for Local Government Open Data, Transparency, Community Indicators and Citizen Journalism

While the Knight News Challenge is still working its way through the screening details, Structured Dynamics‘ Citizen DAN proposal remains in the hunt. Listen to this:

To date, we have been the most viewed proposal by far (2x more than the second most viewed!!! Hooray!) and are in the top five of highest rated (have also been at #1 or #2, depending. Hooray!). Thanks to all of you for your interest and support.

There is much to recommend this KNC approach, not the least of which being able to attract some 2,500 proposals seeking a piece of the 2010 $5 million potential grant awards. Our proposal extends SD’s basic structWSF and conStruct Drupal frameworks to provide a data appliance and network (DAN) to support citizen journalists with data and analysis at the local, community level.

None of our rankings, of course, guarantees anything. But, we also feel good about how the market is looking at these frameworks. We have recently been awarded some pretty exciting and related contracts. Any and all of these initiatives will continue to contribute to the open source Citizen DAN vision.

And, what might that vision be? Well, after some weeks away from it, I read again our online submission to the Knight News Challenge. I have to say: It ain’t too bad! (Plus many supporting goodies and details.)

So, I repeat in its entirety below, the KNC questions and our formal responses. This information from our original submittal is unchanged, except to add some live links where they could not be submitted as such before. (BTW, the bold headers are the KNC questions.) Eventual winners are slated to be announced around mid-June. We’re keeping our fingers crossed, but we are pursuing this initiative in any case.

Describe your project:

Citizen DAN is an open source framework to leverage relevant local data for citizen journalists. It is a:

• Appliance for filtering and analyzing data specific to local community indicators
• Means to visualize local data over time or by neighborhood
• Meeting place for the public to upload and share local data and information
• Web data portal that can be individually tailored by any local community
• Node in a global network of communities across which to compare indicators of community well-being.

Good decisions and good journalism require good information. Starting with pre-loaded government data, Citizen DAN provides any citizen the framework to learn and compare local statistics and data with other similar communities. This helps to promote the grist for citizen journalism; it is also a vehicle for discovery and learning across the community.

Citizen DAN comes pre-packaged with all necessary deployment components and documentation, including local data from government sources. It includes facilities for direct upload of additional local data in formats from spreadsheets to standard databases. Many standard converters are included with the basic package.

Citizen DAN may be implemented by local governments or by community advocacy groups. When deployed, using its clear documentation, sponsors may choose whether or what portions of local data are exposed to the broader Citizen DAN network. Data exposed on the network is automatically available to any other network community for comparison and analysis purposes.

This data appliance and network (DAN) is multi-lingual. It will be tested in three cities in Canada and the US, showing its multi-lingual capabilities in English, Spanish and French.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?

With Citizen DAN, anyone with Web access can now get, slice, and dice information about how their community is doing and how it compares to other communities. We have learned from Web 2.0 and user-generated content that once exposed, useful information can be taken and analyzed in valuable and unanticipated ways.

The trick is to get information that already exists. Citizen journalists of the past may not have either known:

1. Where to find relevant information, or
2. How to ‘slice-and-dice’ that information to extract meaningful nuggets.

By removing these hurdles, Citizen DAN improves the ways information is delivered to communities and provides the framework for sifting through it to extract meaning.

How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)

Government public data in electronic tabular form or as published listings or tables in local newspapers has been available for some time. While meeting strict ‘disclosure’ requirements, this information has neither been readily analyzable nor actionable.

The meaning of information lies in its interpretation and analysis.

Citizen DAN is innovative because it:

1. Is a platform for accessing and exposing available community data
2. Provides powerful Web-based tools for drilling down and mining data
3. Changes the game via public-provided data, and
4. Packages Citizen DAN in a Web framework that is available to any local citizen and requires no expertise other than clicking links.

What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?

Structured Dynamics has already developed and released as open-source code structWSF and conStruct , the basic foundations to this proposal. structWSF provides the network and dataset “backbone” to this proposal; conStruct provides the Drupal portal and Web site framework.

To this foundation we add proven experience and knowledge of datasets and how to access them, as well as tools and converters for how to stage them for standard public use. A key expertise of Structured Dynamics is the conversion of virtually any legacy data format into interoperable canonical forms.

These are important challenges, which require experience in the semantics of data and mapping from varied forms into useful and common frameworks. Structured Dynamics has codified its expertise in these areas into the software underlying Citizen DAN.

Structured Dynamics’ principals are also multi-lingual, with language-neutral architectures and code. The company’s principals are also some of the most prominent bloggers and writers in the semantic Web. We are acknowledged as attentive to documentation and communication.

Finally, Structured Dynamics’ principals have more than a decade of track record in successful data access and mining, and software and venture development.

To this strong basis, we have preliminary city commitments for deploying this project in the United States (English and Spanish) and Canada (French and English).

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

ThisWeKnow offers local Census data, but no community or publishing aspects. Data sharing is in DataSF and DataMine (NYC), but they lack collaboration, community networks and comparisons, or powerful data visualization or mapping.

Citizen DAN is a turnkey platform for any size community to create, publish, search, browse, slice-and-dice, visualize or compare indicators of community well-being. Its use makes the Web more locally focused. With it, researchers, watchdog groups, reporters, local officials and interested citizens can now discover hard data for ‘new news’ or fact-check mainstream media.

What tasks/benchmarks need to be accomplished to develop your project and by when will you complete them?

There are two releases with feedback. Each task summary, listing of task hours (hr) and duration in months (mo), in rough sequence order with overlaps, is:

1. Dataset Prep/Staging: identify, load and stage baseline datasets; provide means for aggregating data at different levels; 420 hr; 2.5 mo
2. Refine Data Input Facility: feature to upload other external data, incl direct from local sources; XML, spreadsheet, JSON forms; dataset metadata; 280 hr; 3 mo
3. Add Data Visualization Component: Flex mapping/data visualization (charts, graphs) using any slice-and-dice; 390 hr; 3 mo
4. Make Multi-linguality Changes: English, French, Spanish versions; 220 hr; 2 mo
5. Refine User Interface: update existing interface in faceted browse; filter; search; record create, manage and update; imports; exports; and user access rights; 380 hr; 3 mo
6. Standard Citizen DAN Ontologies: the coherent schema for the data; 140 hr; 3 mo
7. Create Central Portal: distribution and promotion site for project; 120 hr; 2 mo
8. Deploy/Test First Release: release by end of Mo 5 @ 3 test sites; 300 hr; 4 mo
9. Revise Based on Feedback: bug fixing and 4 mo testing/feedback, then revision #2; 420 hr
10. Package/Document: component packaging for easier installs; increased documentation; 310 hr; 2 mo
11. Marketing/Awareness: see next question; 240 hr; 12 mo
12. Project Management: standard PM/interact with test communities, partners; 220 hr; 12 mo.

See attached task details.

What will you have changed by the end of your project? "Information is the currency of democracy." Thomas Jefferson (n.b.)

We intuitively understand that an informed citizenry is a healthy polity. At the global level and in 250 languages, we see how Wikipedia, matched with the Internet and inexpensive laptops, is bringing unforeseen information and enrichment to all. Across the board, we are seeing the democratization of information.

But very little of this revolution has percolated to the local level.

Only in the past decade or so have we seen free, electronic access to national Census data. We still see local data only published in print or not available at all, limiting both awareness but more importantly understanding and analysis. Data locked up in municipal computers or available but not expressed via crowdsourcing is as good as non-existent.

Though many citizens at the local level are not numeric, intuition has to tell us that the absense of empirical, local data hurts our ability to understand, reason and debate our local circumstances. Are we doing better or worse than yesterday? Than in comparison with our peers? Under what measures does this have meaning about community well being?

The purpose of the Citizen DAN project is to create an appliance — in the same sense of refrigerators keeping our food from spoiling — by which any citizen can crack open and expose relevant data at the local level. Citizen DAN is about enrichening our local information and keeping our communities healthy.

How will you measure progress and ultimately success?

We will measure the progress of the project by the number of communities and local organizations that use the Citizen DAN platform to create and publish community data. Subsidiary measures include the number of:

• Individual users across all installations
• Users contributing uploaded datasets
• Contributed datasets
• Contributed applications based on the platform
• Interconnected sites in the network
• Different Citizen DAN networks
• Substantive articles and blog posts on Citizen DAN
• Mentions of ‘Citizen DAN’ (and local naming or variants, which will be tracked) in news articles
• Contributed blog posts on the central Citizen DAN portal
• Software package downloads, and
• Google citations and hits on ‘Citizen DAN’ (and prominent variants).

These measures, plus active sites with profiles of each, will be monitored and tracked on the central Citizen DAN portal.

‘Ultimate success’ is related to the general growth in transparent government at the local level. Growth in Citizen DAN-related measures on a year-over-year basis or in relation to Gov2.0 would indicate success.

Do you see any risk in the development of your project?

There is no technical risk to this proposal, but there are risks in scope, awareness and acceptance. Our system has been operational for one year for relevant use cases; all components have been integrated, debugged, and put into production.

Scope risks relate to how much data the Citizen DAN platform is loaded with, and how much functionality is included. We balance the data question by using common public datasets for baseline data, then add features for localities to “crowdsource” their own supplementary data. We balance the functionality question by limiting new development to data visualization/mapping and to upload functions (per above), and then to refine what already exists.

Awareness risks arise from a crowded attention space. We can overcome this in two ways. The first is to satisfy users at our test sites. That will result in good recommendations to help seed a snowball effect. The second way is to use social media and our existing Web outlets aggressively. We have been building awareness for our own properties in steady, inch-by-inch measures. While a notable few Web efforts may go viral, the process is not predictable. Steady, constant focus is our preferred recipe.

Acceptance risk is intimately linked with awareness and use. If we can satisfy each Citizen DAN community, then new datasets, new functionality and new awareness will naturally arise. More users and more contributions through the network effect are the best way to broad acceptance.

What is your marketing plan? How will people learn about what you are doing?

Marketing and awareness efforts will include our use of social media, dedicated Web sites, support from test communities, and outreach to relevant community Web sites.

Our own blogs are popular in the semantic Web and structured data space (~3K uniques daily); we have published two posts on Citizen DAN and will continue to do so with more frequency once the effort gets underway.

We will create a central portal (http://citizen-dan.org) based on the project software (akin to our other project sites). The model for this apps and deployments clearinghouse is CrimeReports.com. Using social aspects and crowdsourcing, the site will encourage sharing and best practices amongst the growing number of Citizen DAN communities.

We will blog and post announcements for key releases and milestones on relevant external Web sites including various Gov 2.0 sites, Community Indicators Consortium, GovLoop, Knight News Challenge, the Sunlight Foundation, and so forth. In addition, we will collate and track individual community efforts (maintained on the central Citizen DAN site) and make specific outreach to community data sites (such as DataSF or DataMine at NYC.gov). We will use Twitter (#CitizenDAN, etc) and the social networks of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Meetup to promote Citizen DAN activity.

We will interact with advocates of citizen journalism, and engage civic organizations, media, and government officials (esp in our three test communities) to refine our marketing plan.

Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant?

Citizen DAN is not an experiment. It is a working framework that gives any locality and its citizenry the means to assemble, share and compare measures of its community well-being with other communities. These indicators, in turn, provide substance and grist for greater advocacy and writing and blogging (”journalism”) at the local level.

Granted, there are unknowns: How many localities will adopt the Citizen DAN appliance? How essential will its data be to local advocacy and news? How active will each Citizen DAN installation be in attracting contributions and local data?

We submit the better way to frame the question is the degree of adoption, as opposed to will it work.

Web-based changes in our society and social interaction are leading to the democratization of information, access to it, and channels for expression. Whether ultimately successful in the specific form proposed herein, Citizen DAN and its open source software and frameworks will surely be adopted in one form or another — to one degree or another — in the unassailable trend toward local government transparency and citizen involvement.

In short, Yes: We believe Citizen DAN will continue long after the grant.

If it is to be self-sustainable, what is the plan for making that happen?

Our plan begins with the nature of Citizen DAN as software and framework. Sustainability is a question of whether the appliance itself is useful, and how users choose to leverage it.

Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is an analog. Mediawiki is an enabling infrastructure. Some sites using it are not successful; others wildly so. Success has required the combination of a good appliance with topicality and good management. The same is true for Citizen DAN.

Our plan thus begins with Citizen DAN as a useful appliance, as free open source with great documentation and prominent initial use cases. Our plan continues with our commitment to the local citizen marketplace.

We are developing Citizen DAN because of current trends. We foresee many hundreds of communities adopting the system. Most will be able to do so on their own. Some others may require modifications or assistance. Our self-interest is to ensure a high level of adoption.

An era of citizen engagement is unfolding at the local level, fueled by Web technologies and growing comfort with crowdsourcing and social networks. Meanwhile, local government constraints and pressures for transparency are unleashing locked-up data. These forces will create new opportunities for data literacy by the public, that will itself bring new understanding and improvements in governance and budgeting. We plan on Citizen DAN and its offspring to be one of the catalysts for those changes.

Categories: Semantic Web

Love the Biggie flowing through my music stream today

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 03:52

Love the Biggie flowing through my music stream today

Categories: Music Rec

Firefox Is Losing The Race To Chrome

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/09/2010 - 19:06

Many people have asked me why I started developing ExtensionFM on Chrome before Firefox. Firefox has about 25% market share while Chrome has only 5%. Below are ten reasons why I believe Chrome is the better browser right now and easier to develop applications for.

Let me first say that I have had a love affair with Firefox for the past five years. I started using it in the summer of 2005 when I was, ironically enough, an intern at Microsoft. I want Mozilla to succeed. It is important to have a ‘non-biased’ company in the browser space. But right now, they are getting their butts kicked by Chrome (and its Webkit cousins).

Here are 10 reasons (with 1 bonus) why Chrome has surpassed Firefox.

1. Speed: Chrome renders pages faster than Firefox. On Mac it is even more noticeable.
2. Weight: Chrome uses a lot less memory and system resources than Firefox.
3. HTML5: Both Chrome and Firefox have implemented a bunch of HTML5 features. There are still many more to come. To this point however, each has implemented a different set of features. The set of features that Webkit has implemented are more important at this point - WebDatabase, WebSockets, etc.
4. CSS3: Related and equally important to HTML5 is CSS3. At this point Webkit has implemented a lot more of the spec, including multiple backgrounds and background gradients.
5. Extensions: Chrome extensions do not require a restart on install or when they update. Firefox’s do. Right now Firefox has more extensions. But all the good ones will come to Chrome. Chrome also makes it really easy for developers to package extensions for delivery in the gallery or on a third party site.
6. Video Support: As part of the HTML5 video element, browsers can now create a native video player that is controlled by Javascript (thus bypassing Flash). But this means very little if the video player does not support the leading codec - H.264. Chrome supports this, Firefox does not (b/c of licensing reasons).
7. Audio Support: Equal to the video element above, HTML5 introduced an audio element that is a native player controlled by Javascript. But as with video support, audio support is only as good as the codecs it ships to play back different formats of music. Unbelievably, Firefox does not ship a codec that supports MP3. Let me repeat that. Firefox does not support MP3. They only support the open source and far less used OGG format. Chrome of course supports MP3 (as well as OGG).
8. Startup: On both Mac and PC, Chrome starts up a lot faster than Firefox.
9. UI: Chrome has a very minimal look with only the basic “chrome” surrounding the web window. Firefox looks more bloated. Even Mozilla recognizes this. The next version looks a lot more like Chrome.
10. Threaded Tabs: When a tab in Chrome crashes, it does not freeze or crash the entire browser. This is because each tab runs in its own process. All Firefox tabs run in the same process. If one tab crashes, it brings down the entire browser.
11. Mobile (Bonus): Here is a list of companies that ship mobile devices with a Webkit browser: Apple, Google, Palm, RIM (coming), Nokia. Here is a list of companies that ship a mobile device with a Firefox browser: None.

Like I said in the beginning, I love Firefox and want them to succeed. But you can not ignore the 11 important facts I have listed above. Firefox is losing to Chrome (and its Webkit cousins). Mozilla knows this. I want Firefox to succeed and I believe that it can. The best part about Google (and Apple via Webkit) entering the browser market is that they have pushed the rate of innovation to never before seen heights. Let’s hope this continues for many years to come. Right now, however, I am choosing Chrome as the browser to develop for.

Categories: Music Rec

RT @cashmusic: The new @familyoftheyear EP, Through The Trees is out now, available directly from...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/09/2010 - 18:50

RT @cashmusic: The new @familyoftheyear EP, Through The Trees is out now, available directly from the band at http://familyoftheyear.net/

Categories: Music Rec

RT @extensionfm: New Release: Auto-updating sites and the music activity stream -...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 03/08/2010 - 21:28

RT @extensionfm: New Release: Auto-updating sites and the music activity stream - http://bit.ly/9nNu6R

Categories: Music Rec

ExtensionFM New Release: Auto-Updating Sites and the Music Activity Stream

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 03/08/2010 - 17:47

extensionfm:

The latest release (3.2) introduces auto-updating sites. This means that songs will automatically be added to your library, from the sites you have already visited, as those sites post them. You do not have to re-visit sites to get new songs. This all happens in the background.

The All Songs List view has been tweaked a little with timestamps to better reflect this new ‘Music Activity Stream’:

All sites have auto-updating turned on by default. You can turn this off on a site-by-site basis by right-clicking on a site in the All Songs Pane View:

You can now also remove an entire site and all of its songs by right-clicking and choosing delete:

If you would like to remove individual songs, you can still right-click on any song in All Songs Pane view and choose delete. If you remove all the songs from a site, the site will still remain and continue to auto-update if you have not chosen to turn that off

Categories: Music Rec

RT @tnw_apps: Extension.fm, the must have music add-on for Chrome http://tnw.to/15miY by...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 03/08/2010 - 12:39

RT @tnw_apps: Extension.fm, the must have music add-on for Chrome http://tnw.to/15miY by @thomcummings

Categories: Music Rec

RT @albertwenger: Doing some reading online and discovering new music courtesy of...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Sun, 03/07/2010 - 03:46

RT @albertwenger: Doing some reading online and discovering new music courtesy of http://extension.fm and http://hypem.tumblr.com

Categories: Music Rec

On A Smarter Planet … Some Organizations Will Be Smarter-er Than Others

Jeff Jonas - Sat, 03/06/2010 - 19:48

As planet Earth generates more data from more sensors and as this data comes together for better prediction … there will be plenty of winners and losers.

The losers will be those organizations still coping with information overload, unable to make heads or tails of what they know (Enterprise Amnesia).  They will miss the obvious.  Their costs will soar, their customer satisfaction will drop and confidence in their brand will erode.  You will get duplicate mailings from them.  They will try to sell you something you already bought from them weeks ago. 

The winners will be those organizations that make better decisions, faster.  How fast?  Fast enough to do something smart as the transaction is happening, not minutes, hours, or days later. 

The closer to real-time an organization can operate, the more competitive it will be (Enterprise Intelligence).  They will be more efficient in how they deliver their products or services, their customers will be happier, and they will be able to stop many more bad things (e.g., fraud) from happening before they happen.

Hence my ongoing obsession with real-time sensemaking systems and my beef with batch systems. Just to be clear, not all batch systems are bad.  In fact, there are a number of things batch systems are well-suited for, like end-of-month accounting cycles, or end-of-night audit in hotel property management systems.  There are even some forms of data mining, pattern discovery, outlier detection, and so on, where after-the-fact data analysis (batch) is well suited.

That said the closer to real-time one can get the right answer and respond, the better.   And milliseconds matter.

Heck, when a casino can be cheated out of $250,000 in 15 minutes, what good is an hourly algorithm?

So when the IBM marketing machine asked me what I was working on, I explained the importance of real-time sensemaking this way: imagine trying to cross a street but you can only see how the traffic looked 5 minutes ago.  This struck a chord and is, as of this week, a TV commercial:

Who’d a thunk?

Net Net: Organizations not engaged in real-time sensemaking are going to find themselves getting Dumb and Dumber.

 

LINKS TO MY COLLEAGUES ADS:

IBMer Julia Grace’s TV Commercial

IBMer John Cohn’s TV Commercial

RELATED POSTS:

Ubiquitous Sensors? You Have Seen Nothing Yet

Why Faster Systems Can Make Organizations Dumber Faster

Enterprise Amnesia: Organizations Have Lost Their Minds

Enterprise Intelligence – My Presentation at the Third Annual Web 2.0 Summit

Intelligent Organizations – Assembling Context and The Proof is in the Chimp!

ps - just bought it on Amazon

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 21:26

ps - just bought it on Amazon

Categories: Music Rec

Portugal. the Man came out with a new album this week! There needs to be a better way to learn about...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 21:26

Portugal. the Man came out with a new album this week! There needs to be a better way to learn about these things. Its not on Spotify yet :(

Categories: Music Rec

Big Up Mr. Dart

Searching for the Perfect Vibe - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 19:22

Big Up Mr. Dart

Categories: Music Content

Multiki - Trevor Watts and Jamie Harris from the Live in Sao...

Searching for the Perfect Vibe - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 19:22

Multiki - Trevor Watts and Jamie Harris from the Live in Sao Paulo, Brasil album on Hi4Head Records

Categories: Music Content

RT @rstaicut: It’s a great day for BeeMe! Testing today and getting ready to launch at our...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 17:02

RT @rstaicut: It’s a great day for BeeMe! Testing today and getting ready to launch at our first coffee shop on Monday.

Categories: Music Rec

Epithelium

quotesque - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 12:40

Philip Beesley's talk on living architectures, one of several highlights of mine at Sonic Acts XIII, along with J.P. Sonntag's low frequency standing waves and BJ Nilsen's multi-channel storm in a church.

THE PHENOMENAL WORLD OF FACEBOOK GAMES AND OTHER SOCIAL GAMES

comments on the social graph - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 07:14

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development, which will emerge, from the popular "Facebook Games" era. If you do not know much about the phenomenon that is social games then watch this. His insight that there are more Farmville players than there are Twitter accounts is powerful. He also explores how games are breaking out of the confines of fantasy and moving more into our day-to-day realities. What he sees as glorious future gets slightly dystopian at the end, but very much worth watching.

Xbox 360 Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5Posted by Tony Effik

Paris, Tokyo by Lupe Fiasco. This song is 3 years old and I...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Thu, 03/04/2010 - 14:55

Paris, Tokyo by Lupe Fiasco. This song is 3 years old and I don’t know much about Lupe Fiasco. But I just discovered this song and can’t get it out of my head. Need to check out his albums now in my never-ending quest to find good hip-hop.

auri:

Lupe Fiasco - Paris, Tokyo.

Let’s go to sleep in Paris,
And wake up in Tokyo.
Have a dream in New Orleans, 
Fall in love in Chicago. 

Categories: Music Rec

Unofficial Artist Guide to SXSW

Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Thu, 03/04/2010 - 13:48

I’m excited! Next week I travel to Austin for a week long computer+music geek-fest at SXSW.  A big part of SXSW is the music – there are nearly 2,000 different artists playing at SXSW this year. But that presents a problem – there are so many bands going to SXSW (many I’ve never heard of) that I find it very hard to figure out which bands I should go and see.  I need a tool to help me find sift through all of the artists – a tool that will help me decide which artists I should add to my schedule and which ones I should skip.   I’m not the only one who was daunted by the large artist list.  Taylor McKnight, founder of SCHED*, was thinking the same thing.  He wanted to give his users a better way to plan their time at SXSW.  And so over a couple of weekends Taylor built (with a little backend support from us)  The Unofficial Artist Discovery Guide to SXSW.

The Unofficial Artist Discovery Guide to SXSW is a tool that allows you to explore the many artists attending this year’s SXSW.  It lets you search for artists,  browse popularity, music style, ‘buzzworthiness’,  or similarity to your favorite artists – and it will make recommendations for you based on your music taste (using your Last.fm, Sched* or Hype Machine accounts) .  The Artist Guide supplies enough context (bios, images, music, tag clouds, links) to help you decide if you might like an artist.

Here’s the guide:

Here’s a quick tour of some of the things you can do with the guide.  First off, you can Search for artists by name, genre/tag or location. This helps you find music when you know what you are looking for.

However, you may not always be sure what you are looking for – that’s where you use Discover. This gives you recommendations based on the music you already like.  Type in the name of a few artists (even artists that are not playing at SXSW) or your SCHED*, Hype Machine or Last.fm user name, and ‘Discover’ will give you a set of recommendations for SXSW artists based on your music taste.  For example, I’ve been listening to Charlotte Gainsbourg lately so I can use the artist guide to help me find SXSW artists that I might like:

If I see an artist that looks interesting I can drill down and get more info about the artist:

From here I can read the artist bio, listen to some audio, explore other similar SXSW artists or add the event to my SCHED* schedule.

I use Last.fm quite a bit, so I can enter my Last.fm name and get SXSW recommendations based upon my Last.fm top artists. The artist guide tries to mix things up a little bit so if I don’t like the recommendations I see, I can just ask again and I can get a different set. Here are some recommendations based on my recent listening at Last.fm:

If you’ve been using the wonderful SCHED* to keep track of your SXSW calendar you can use the guide to get recommendations based on artists that you’ve already added to your SXSW calendar.

In addition to search and discovery, the guide gives you a number of different ways to browse the SXSW Artist space.  You can browse by ‘buzzworthy’ artists – these are artists that are getting the most buzz on the web:

Or the most well-known artists:

You can browse by the style of music via a tag cloud:

And by venue:

Building the guide was pretty straightforward. Taylor used the Echo Nest APIs to get the detailed artist data such as familiarity, popularity, artist bios, links, images, tags and audio. The only data that was not available at the Echo Nest was the venue and schedule info which was  provided by Arkadiy (one of Taylor’s colleagues).  Even though SXSW artists can be extremely long tail (some don’t even have Myspace pages),  the Echo Nest was able to provide really good coverage for these sets (There was coverage for over 95% of the artists).     Still there are a few gaps and I suspect there may be a few errors in the data (my favorite wrong image is for the band Abe Vigoda).   If you are in a band that is going to SXSW and you see that we have some of your info wrong, send me an email (paul@echonest.com) and I’ll make it right.

We are excited to see the this Artist Discovery guide built on top of the Echo Nest.  It’s a great showcase for the Echo Nest developer platform and working with Taylor was great.  He’s one of these hyper-creative, energetic types – smart, gets things done and full of new ideas.   Taylor may be adding  a few more features to the guide before SXSW, so stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted on new developments.

Categories: Music Rec

I support the #StartupVisa. Send a tweet to Congress using @2gov at http://startupvisa.2gov.org or...

Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Wed, 03/03/2010 - 20:06

I support the #StartupVisa. Send a tweet to Congress using @2gov at http://startupvisa.2gov.org or just retweet this tweet!

Categories: Music Rec

Unfilling regions in Emacs

Chris Lowis Blog - Wed, 03/03/2010 - 00:00

Unfilling regions in Emacs

03 Mar 2010 – London

I have the habit of hitting M-q every 5 seconds or so when working with text in emacs. This key combination is bound to “fill-paragraph” and inserts line breaks into the current paragraph to keep the line width to approximately 80 characters.

If you’re cutting and pasting the text into an email message or website form though, this is often not what you want. The way round this is to “unfill” the current paragraph or region. The following commands will help:

(defun unfill-paragraph () (interactive) (let ((fill-column (point-max))) (fill-paragraph nil))) (defun unfill-region (start end) (interactive "r") (let ((fill-column (point-max))) (fill-region start end nil)))

But now you have lines in your emacs buffer that wrap in an unusable way. Longlines-mode to the rescue (M-x longlines-mode). Longlines mode uses “soft newlines” which will not show up when yanked or saved to disk.

I’ve recently added my emacs config to github . Feel free to have a poke around and let me know what other emacs tricks I am missing!

Categories: Semantic Web