A few days back, I tripped across a brilliant idea called Thounds, best-described via the video below:

For those of you without the requisite patience for video viewing, Thounds is a social platform for the recording and sharing of musical snippets, which can be added-to collaboratively by other users within the network.
This is not a terrifically [...]

A very intriguing use of Augmented Reality for content creation, not just informatics and product demonstration. Now it gets interesting.

At the risk of growing perilously-close to a Boy in Static fan-site, I felt the urge to post yet another new video from Alexander Chen, this one for the Toy Baby Grand single.

Boy in Static – Toy Baby Grand from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.
This video grew out of some quick “Eureka!” moments Philip had when [...]

Among the few presentations I regret missing at SXSW was Anthony Volodkin’s panel on music discovery. Thankfully, the entirety of Anthony and Paul Lamere’s Powerpoint presentation on ‘why is music recommendation broken’ has been posted online (and embedded below):

Jason Herskowitz, on Globallistic, digs deeper into the notion of music discovery, writing:

in short there are more approaches than most can shake a stick at… with some of the more notable examples being (as I see it):

• “Musicologist”/Expert Analysis – a hundred people with headphones on categorize songs on a few hundred different attributes (e.g. minor chords, upbeat, heavy piano)
• Content-Based/Waveform Analysis – a computer looks at the sonic attributes of a song (e.g. tempo, harmonic range, etc) and then looks for other songs that posses similar attributes
• Collaborative Filtering – people who listen to/buy/highly rate song X, also have a high correlation to buying/listening to/highly rating song Y
• Editorial (e.g Bloggers, Pitchfork, Radio) – some one broadcasts their opinion… “hey, these guys sound like so and so and they are good. I give them 5 stars”.
• Semantic (e.g. tag clouds) – by matching tags, genres and sentiment keywords (either manually input by users or extracted from web articles)
• Curator (e.g. playlist sharing) – community generated “top song” and “just listened” charts, curated playlists, TV/movie soundtracks. These could be actively curated lists of songs (e.g. playlists) or passively programmed by the curator (e.g. “just listened”).
• Shuffle - just a random selection of tracks from a fixed set of songs
• Biographical – this artist you like was influence by this other artist or was also in this other band
• Friend-to-Friend – the most common, one friend tells another… “hey, have you heard X? You’d like them”.

along with this gem:

I had a conversation this morning with J T. Ramsay where he told me: “[music] discovery is one of the biggest fallacies of all time. If people were so amped on discovery, radio would have been formatted differently.” And I have to admit, I don’t disagree.

My own experience with music has been one of constant and rigorous discovery, and I’ve been delighted by the relative improvements in music recommendation since the dawn of CDNow, whose engine was likely to recommend Bob Dylan or The Beatles to fans of nearly any submission.

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Fans of a more esoteric brand of broadcast will enjoy this collection of vintage radios at the Color + Design blog. Some of my favorites are included below.

I am optimistic about one day learning how to whistle.

I am optimistic about my backyard garden; it was solid clay when I started on it, and now it’s thriving.

I am optimistic about going for a run weekly.

I am optimistic about my lemon tree being fruitful next spring.

I am optimistic about becoming proficient on the ukelele.

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Alex Chen is a musician and creative talent, currently living in San Francisco. He is 1/2 of Boy in Static, whose new album Candy Cigarette will be released April 14, 2009 on Fake Four Inc, and features contributions from Marc Bianchi, Ulrich Schnauss and others. The fourth track, Young San Francisco, can be downloaded here. His Sonata for the Unaware (2003) and work for NewsToday, Volkswagen, IKEA and others have garnered him critical and public acclaim.

Alex lives in San Francisco, California.

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This post is a selection from The Optimist Conspectus – an ongoing not-for-profit attempt to both quantify and qualify resurgent optimism. To learn more or submit your own sources of optimism, click here.

Two very insightful interviews posted this morning:
Chris Wilson over at The Marketing Fresh Peel interviews Piers Fawkes of PSFK as part of his Future of Work series. Fawkes opens up on his views of the changes in the workplace that Gen-Y will face:
Gen Yers are going to work for scores of companies and they need [...]

Henry Owings, publisher of the seminal zine Chunklet, posted recently on an endeavor by Soundscreen Design to publish a collection of the best 7″ record sleeve artwork of the last 2o or so years.
As a fan of Henry’s (the photo above demonstrating proof of my friendship via my Chunklet Neighborhoodie was taken at the 2008 [...]