peter martin

Every once in a while I like to take stock of my web habits and see where I’m really spending my time. I test out new sites and services at a pretty brisk pace, dropping the majority in a vicious selection process. The survivors aren’t necessarily the best, but they’re where I spend my time, and it’s worth reflecting on why:

• Tumblr. Three complimentary reasons why the Tumblr dashboard is now my most frequented page. It’s a simple and eloquent way to post what I want to share; the people I follow are a creative and fascinating group that churn up a constant river of interesting content; and the social connections and “stickiness” have been enhanced with every version upgrade. My web home.
• Netvibes. My preferred feed reader and content aggregator. I have a front page with email accounts, weather, calendar, and Red Sox schedule (only the most important stuff!), tabs for news, companies, individuals, business, tech, photo, music, video/film, and extras. This is my newsstand, where I drink from the firehose of the Internet.
• Yahoo Fantasy. During baseball and football seasons, I’m checking these pages several times a day.
• Flickr. Constant stream of quality image candy and feedback on my photos. The only web service I’ve paid an annual fee for the past few years without blinking.
• Sons of Sam Horn. Red Sox fan message board. Yes, I have a Sox problem.
• Gmail. I connect to my accounts via IMAP through mail.app, the iPhone, and Netvibes, but primarily through the web interface through the Fluid site specific browser. I have a lot of filters and labels set up so the only things that hit the inbox are what I need to pay attention to.
• Facebook. Primarily to keep track of far-flung friends that have accumulated along the way.
• Twitter. Increasingly interesting as the filters improve and I hook in more services as notifications. Loving Nambu on the Mac and iPhone, also Tumblr as a Twitter client.
• Hulu. Great quality, presentation, stability. What web video should be. If the dinosaurs can’t see that, I’ll just go back to a homerolled broadcasting solution of RSS torrent feeds of XVID videos and they’ll lose what ad dollars they’ve got going with Hulu.
• Lifehacker. My favorite blog, now and forever. 

I have a lot of thoughts on the music industry, some scattershot and incomplete, some fully formed and mostly coherent. Mostly I default to my standard media observation that the only important entities are the content producer and the consumer, with every middleman and distribution network on the chopping block at all times.

Music discovery is incredibly important in the successful propagation of acts and genres, and I’m fascinated by how quickly this process is evolving on the internet (in sharp contrast to the record industry’s death rattle protests). I like to blend objective and subjective assessments whenever possible, and both angles are well-represented.

Objectively, I love digging through Allmusic.com’s extensive database for recommendations of similar artists, threads connecting acts through genre development, and their extensive tagging discipline. Pandora is similarly objective in their goal of mapping the musical qualities of artists/songs/albums and spitting out a playlist of similarly constructed tracks. Last.fm and iTunes Genius depend heavily on the ‘neighbor’ principle, assuming that songs played together or in playlists by one user will lead to useful recommendations for someone with similar taste.

Subjective recommendations tend to be a bit murkier to pinpoint, but operate mostly on a trust ideal. Friends who I judge to have good taste in music will have an overwhelming impact on what I listen to, and radio stations that have established a particular sound will be trusted as well. The rise of mp3 blogs has multiplied this on the web, adding the instant impact of embedded tracks playable on demand. The Tumblr dashboard’s audio posts have an especially “sticky” quality, as the player is consistent visually, the users are “trusted” bloggers that I chose to follow, and the presentation in the timeline prompts an almost Pavlovian response to click play and listen to at least a minute or so of the track.

Despite what the record industry middlemen may claim, music creation is alive and well. Distribution networks and music discovery services are flourishing and evolving at a rapid (if anarchistic) pace, and even if monetization models are proving difficult to pinpoint, it probably has far more to do with the machinations of the record industry than it does with consumers. Viva la revolucion.