Technology

 by Brendon J. Wilson

iTunes’ Music Madness

It’s been a bit hectic, what with the final two weeks of the MBA approaching, but somewhere in there I managed to download iTunes for Windows. A millionth of a second after launching the newly-installed application, I proceeded to uninstall WinAmp, saying my goodbye quickly so as not to betray my lack of emotion at its departure from my hard-drive. You know Apple is onto something when not only am I deleting the first application I’ve installed on any new machine for the past five years, but even my mother-in-law is looking at buying an iPod.

Now, I’m not one to advocate or admit to mass copyright piracy via a public medium, so let’s just say that I have a sizable digital music collection and leave it at that. But, needless to say, iTunes makes my music addiction a bit more manageable. I can sort! I can shuffle! I can even track which songs I really like, in case I get smacked in the head and forget! It’s lovely. Other people apparently think so too. While pretending to get some work done in the university library, I fired up iTunes only to be surprised by the number of other computers sharing out their music using the application’s built-in streaming capabilities. As Inspector Gadget said to Penny: Yowza!

The most interesting part about trawling through other people’s iTunes libraries is observing the variety of music to which people listen: Mozart, Pink, AC/DC, Britney Spears, Oscar Peterson, and so on. And that’s on one machine. People are shamelessly mixing and matching musical genres in their playlists with wild abandon – crazy! It’s refreshing to see so much variety in people’s musical tastes, even if some of the combinations are liable to make them as sick as a drink made from Scotch, Vodka, and Gin and served from an unclean toilet bowl. To those musical pioneers who are about to mix Joni Mitchell with a side of AC/DC and some Pavarotti: I salute you!

Apparently, my acceptance for this musical cross-breeding is not shared by all, and the latest Apple-inspired revolution has an ugly name: playlistism. That’s right, we’ve reached the level of social sophistication where judging a person on the basis of race, gender, religion, nationality, and political affiliation is not enough. We’ve pushed the boundary: now we can judge you by your previously-secret addiction to kitschy show tunes! Point and laugh everybody!

in Culture / Entertainment / Technology 2 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Syndicate the Wagons

As part of my continuing job search, I’ve been trying to keep an eye on developments in the Vancouver technology community. This is a time-intensive process to say the least, what with all the individual sources of news on the Vancouver technology scene and business environment that are available.

One of the common complaints I’ve heard about the Vancouver business community is that the community is extremely fragmented – everyone seems to be running around, doing their own thing. As a result, the impact of any single effort is greatly reduced due to the duplication of work and the lack of critical mass required to garner attention from stakeholders within the community. Furthermore, even trying to figure out what’s going on in the community is even more difficult, given the number of groups providing information, publishing reports, and organizing events.

What the Vancouver technology business community needs is one group to take the reins, to use its partnerships and technology savvy to pull together these disparate sources of information and provide them en-masse to the community.

In an ideal world, this would not be a difficult task – after all, the technology to accomplish this consolidation of information has already been created using XML: RSS/RDF syndication. Ideally all major local business organizations and associations would syndicate their news, their event calendar, and even their job postings, enabling individuals to aggregate these feeds to suit their individual tastes. Unfortunately, none of the organizations syndicate their content, and mentioning RSS to these organizations might elicit some rather weird responses (“RSS? Oh yeah, I love him. Especially that song he did with Eminem.”)

That presents the opportunity for some capable party within the local community to step up and either enable organizations to syndicate their content, or do it on their behalf in a manner that adds to the value of that party’s own offerings. There’s one party in particular that I think is well-positioned and capable of performing this task, while improving their own performance: T-Net, the maintainers of the BCTechnology.com site. Not only would this provide a valuable service to the business community, but it would also provide T-Net with additional readership that it could parlay into additional revenue streams for its job posting and advertising businesses.

To gather these scattered information sources, T-Net could employ some rudimentary screen-scraping (ugh, I know, but there’s no choice in a world without RSS/RDF) technology to extract excerpts of news postings and link to the original item, thus presenting readers with a “complete” picture of what’s going on in BC business. If it was really smart, it would even allow readers to customize their interface to include only those sources in which they are interested – thus allowing them to extract even more valuable demographic information to drive its existing product sales or develop new products. In the long run, it would help organizations in the business community adopt the technology required to make spreading their message even easier, thus cementing T-Net role as the one-stop source of information on the BC technology scene.

in Technology 2 comments