Nouvelles musiques: adieu la radio [fr]

[en] Years ago, when I sold my car, the radio stopped being my source for new music. Now it's TV series, Facebook, and Tumblr.

Il y a des années de cela, lorsque j’avais une voiture, je passais chaque jour du temps sur la route à écouter de la musique et… à chanter avec. Des périodes CD (c’était avant l’iPhone!) et des périodes radio. J’aimais la radio qui ne parlait pas, qui passait simplement de la musique.

C’était là que je découvrais de nouveaux artistes. Grâce à la radio que j’achetais des CDs (toujours ou presque dans les bacs à 10-15 balles).

Quand j’ai vendu ma voiture en 2007, j’ai perdu non seulement mon local de chant préféré (heureusement je chante avec Café Café, sinon mes pauvres cordes vocales se ratatineraient) mais aussi ma source de nouvelle musique.

En fait, j’ai aussi perdu mon lieu principal d’écoute de musique. J’aime travailler dans le silence, je n’arrive pas à lire ou écrire en musique. Alors j’écoute de la musique quand je fais le ménage ou quand je retouche des photos mais… c’est vrai que j’aime le silence.

Aujourd’hui, piétonne, j’écoute aussi de la musique en marchant ou dans les transports publics, mais c’est très frustrant pour moi de devoir “la fermer” et de ne pas chanter à plein poumons comme j’en ai envie. (Non, je ne suis pas “celle-là” dans le train qui chante pour tout le wagon avec son casque dans les oreilles…)

En plus, merci iPhone, la musique a maintenant une rude concurrence: les podcasts. Je suis accro à On The Media et à Radiolab, par exemple. (Si vous avez des émissions de qualité comparable à me proposer en français, je suis preneuse, hein.)

La radio a donc complètement disparu de mon radar — si ce n’est sous forme de ces podcasts, ou lorsque j’y passe 😉

Depuis quelques années, donc, j’ai conscience que mon “répertoire” musical stagne. Je n’achète plus de CDs depuis longtemps (un des derniers était Back to Bedlam de James Blunt) et malgré ce que pourraient croire certains, je ne suis pas une grande pirate: trop paresseuse pour télécharger “illégalement”, je me contente d’acheter des morceaux isolés sur iTunes. En passant, j’ai la sensation de payer pour le service plus que pour la musique (vous m’entendez, là-bas?)

Source première de nouvelles musiques? Les séries TV (et films), Grey’s Anatomy en tête. Un petit coup de Shazam pour identifier le morceau qui passe, et hop, j’achète.

Deuxième source? C’est ça qui me fait écrire aujourd’hui: mes fils d’actualité sur Facebook et Tumblr. Mes amis qui partagent vidéos et morceaux qu’ils aiment. Parfois, j’achète.

Reverting iTunes 10 to an iTunes 9 look: Icon, Buttons, Colors [en]

[fr] Quelques liens utiles pour redonner à iTunes 10 le look d'iTunes 9.

Thanks to @tommorris (he has a blog too) my iTunes 10 has stopped looking “wrong”. Here’s how to change the icon back to the iTunes 9 icon, arrange the window buttons horizontally instead of vertically (just stick that code, including backticks, into the terminal, and hit Enter), and even bring colour back to your left sidebar (alternate download link for the file to replace).

Honestly, what were they thinking?

Geeky Frustrations [en]

[fr] Quelques râlages (comme quoi je ne fais pas ça qu'en français) au sujet de certains outils que j'utilise quotidiennement.

Right, so, just so I can get it off my chest, here is a list of little things that bug me with the tools I use daily. If I save them for a “proper write-up” they probably will never be posted, so… here goes.

  • Twitter: let me see a differential list of those I follow and those who follow me, both ways. I need to know who is following me that I’m not following (maybe I missed somebody out) and who I’m following but they’re not (to keep in mind they won’t see stuff I twitter).
  • Twitter: let me tag my friends, or sort them into buddy groups. Then let me activate phone alerts for only certain groups. One-by-one management is just impossible with 100 or so friends.
  • Adium: let me turn off Gmail notifications. I have Google Notifier for that. I hate having to click “OK” on that window all the time.
  • Google Reader: let me drag’n drop feeds from one folder to another.
  • Facebook: let me import more than one RSS feed in my notes.
  • Nokia 6280 and Macbook: please sync with each other each time I ask you to, not once out of three.
  • Nokia 6280: gimme a “mark all as read” option for my text messages, please!
  • Nokia 6280: I’d say something about the really crappy camera, but there isn’t much you can do about it now, can you.
  • iPod: let me loop through all episodes of a podcast instead of having to go to the next episode manually.
  • iTunes: let me mix playlists as a source for Party Shuffle (30% My Favorites, 30% Not Listened in Last week, 40% Artist I’m Obsessing Over These Days… for example)
  • Google Reader and del.icio.us: find a way to allow me to automatically post Shared Items to del.icio.us too.
  • Flickr: let me link to “My Favorite photos tagged …” so I can show my readers what I’ve found.
  • Added 18.02.07 0:10 Google Ajax-y Homepage: let me Share Google Reader items, not just star them.

Certainly more, but these were those which were bugging me badly just now. Well, they’re off my chest, now I can go back to fretting about all the stuff I need to get rid of in my flat and which is still lying around because I haven’t quite figured out the optimal way to dispose of it.

Stowe Boyd: Building Social Applications [en]

Warning: these are my notes of Stowe‘s workshop at LIFT, meaning my understanding and interpretation of what he said. They might not reflect accurately what Stowe told us, and might even be outright wrong in some places. Let me know if you think I really messed up somewhere.

Update 05.2007: enjoy the slideshow and the video of his presentation (not the workshop!).

Questions to play ball with:

  1. What makes social applications social (or not)
  2. How can we make applications more social?
  3. What are the common factors in successful social applications?
  4. What is worth building?

  5. iTunes vs. Last.fm; also non-social applications which implement, at some point, some social component.

“Software intended to shape culture.” Stowe Boyd, in Message, August 1999

steph-note: a step further than “groupware”

LIFT'07... Stowe Boyd

Applications which are qualitatively different. But they haven’t replaced the rest: people are still building applications which allow people to buy stuff online. But we’re looking for ways to stick the humans back in there (“what do the top 10 authorities on cellphones recommend?”)

Read: The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg (Third Place, not home and not work)

Decreasing affiliation in the USA (Putnam — sp?). People spend less time “hanging out” with people. steph-note: cf. danah/MySpace More TV. Commuting isn’t that significant, but hours in front of the TV is. The light at the end of the tunnel, the only hope we’ve got left, is the internet. Social hours spent on the internet are hours not spent watching TV (steph-note: yep!)

TV is not involvement in people, but in this “entertainment culture”. TV reached lowest numbers in the USA since ’50s.

One way we can measure the success of a social application is how much it moves us in that direction.

Social: me first. Put the individual in the centre. Look at the difference between traditional journalism (disembodied third voice) and blogging (first person, you know who’s writing and who’s reading). Need to start with needs and desires of the people using it (?).

Adoption happens in stages. First, the application needs to satisfy the needs of an individual, in such a way that he/she comes back. And then, there needs to be stuff to share that encourages the individual to invite his friends in.

my passions — my people — my markets

Start with the people. Put the people in the foreground (but how?) Easy to fail if you don’t do that right. How are people going to find each other? Second, support their networks/networking.

Only third: realisation of money — markets — shipping etc.

Give up control to the users: “the edge dissolves the centre”.

To review a social app, you need to use it “for real” over an extended period of time.

Xing: the edge doesn’t dissolve the centre. E.g. can’t create a group. Need to ask them by e-mail, and they try to control group creation and management.

Build an environment in which people are “free”. Allow them to find each other.

Success factors for a social application: me first and bottom up. Otherwise, it won’t spread.

Blogging: primary goal is social interaction and networking (steph-note: half agree, there is the “writing and being read and getting some recognition” goal too — and that is not necessarily social interaction and does not necessarily lead to network contacts)

What suicide girls get right: low price, real people, real lives, social stuff like chat, pictures, etc. They have the connections between the people as the primary way to go around.

Semi/a-social

  • iTunes
  • Bestbuy.com
  • Pandora (until recently)
  • After the fact (eBay: reputation, Netflix: friends in a tab, Amazon: recommendations from other users, Basecamp: not that social, fails some of the critical tests)

The Buddylist is the Centre of the Universe…

A case against IM being disruptive: the user chooses how disruptive the client is (blings, pop-up messages, etc… same with e-mail)

Totally acceptable to not answer on IM. But also, maybe at times your personal productivity is less important than your relationship with the person IMing you.

“I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.”

(Give to others, and they’ll give to you. Help your buddies out, be there for them, and others will be there for you when you need them.)

List of hand-picked people who are on your list.

Groups help huge communities scale, in the way they bring them down to manageable sizes for human beings again. (Dunbar constant, roughly 150 people.)

Six degrees of connection doesn’t work. People are strangers. Even second degree is really weak.

Difference between people you really talk to, and “contacts” (often people will have two accounts => should build this kind of thing into the service — cf. Twitter with “friends” and “people you follow”).

Me, Mine, and Market.

Market: it’s the marketplace where the application builders are going to be able to make money by supporting my interaction/networking with “mine”.

You can’t “make an app social”, you need to start over most of the time.

Think about the social dimension first, and then what the market is. E.g. social invoicing app, what could the market be? Finding people to do work for you. And then you can invoice them using the system.

E.g. Individual: “I need a perfect black dress for that dinner party.” => who knows where to shop for the most fashionable stuff? => market = buying the perfect black dress, with commission to the recommender. (New social business model!)

Facebook profile: all about flow, it’s not static. It’s a collection of stuff going on in my world. Information about my blog (posts), friends… I don’t have to do anything, and it changes.

It represents my links to the world. People want to belong. Be in a context where what they do and say matters. Make it easy for users to find other people who will care about them.

Orkut failed because it was just social networking for the sake of social networking. Not targeted at a specific group of people. Nobody who cares! Disease-like replication and then died down. Nothing to do there.

Swarm intelligence. People align around authority and influence. Some people are more connected then others. Inevitable. Swarmth = Stowe-speak for measure of reputation. As soon as reputation brings something to those who have it, charlatans step in and try to figure out how to game the system. Need to be aware of that, to discover those cheating mechanisms and counter them.

General principle: things are flowing, and we want to support the rapid flow of information (ie, stuff that goes in my profile). “traffic”: do you make it possible for people to get information from a variety of sources delivered quickly to them? (e.g. Facebook bookmarklet) (traffic=possible metric).

The media hold the pieces, but not the sense of the conversation. You need to immerse yourself into the flow to get it. How transformative is it to get a constant flow of information from people you care about? Can’t evaluate that from the outside.

Tags

cf. David Weinberger: tags matter for social reasons. The power of classification is handed out to the users. They use it to find information and to find each other. They define implicit social groupings.

If people don’t “get” tags, the interface isn’t good. Because the concept is really simple. (e.g. Flickr, del.icio.us get it right)

Discovery

Primary abiding motivator of anybody on the internet: discovery (things, places, people, self)

One of Stowe’s pet peeves: Groups and Groupings

Networks are asymmetric, accept it. Everybody is not equal in a group. The groups are always to some extent asymmetric.

Groupings are ad hoc assemblages of peope with similar interests (from my point of view). (My buddy list categorisation.)

Groups try to be symmetric.

Community of tags. They happen automatically.

Power Laws

There will always be people with more power than others, get over it. The recommendation of somebody with more swarmth should count more than that of one with no swarmth.

Accept and work with the imbalance of power.

But careful! The people decide who has more swarmth. And you need to constantly counter the games. Natural social systems are self-policient (sp?).

Reputation

Measure and reward swarmth (steph-note: !== popularity, quantity)

Reputation is not transportable from one network to another.

Deep Design

  • last.fm (neighbours!)
  • upcoming.org (events are nothing without people!!)
  • Facebook
  • ThisNext (about design and fashion)

First, just build the social app. Once the social stuff is in place, build the market (see Last.fm).

Journal where you can integrate music references. With backlinks from artists.

Mistake? tags aren’t source of groupings.

steph-thought: Flickr groups are not just about people, they are about editing content (creating collective photo albums).

If you have an existing social app, and an entrenched body of users, to make people switch to your new product you need to be an order of magnitude better.

Tag beacons: a recommended tag (e.g. lift07)

If you make people tag an item, the tags used stabilize over time. After a while, the same 10-15 tags. Little chance a new user two years latter will suddenly introduce another tag.

ThisNext is pretty. A piece of social interaction stuff missing however — can’t communicate with other people. Profile just leads to recommendations.

Cautionary Tales

Basecamp and the Federation of Work: multiple logins, domains — fragmentation. Wanted to be able to pull everything in a single place. Not simple to keep track of everything one has in the system. Pervasive static models with hardly any flow. It’s an online groupware app, not a social app. It doesn’t put me in the foreground.

Outside.in is about finding people who are in your zipcode. I remember Stowe did a post on this some time back. “Where’s the people?”

You only get one first launch. What’s the point of missing it by doing it before you got to the social tipping point?

Blinksale: where’s the market? (invoicing thing)

Explorations

Where is all this going? All commerce on the internet in the future will be social. Put in context of social recommendations etc (perfect little black dresses). A social iTunes — what would it look like? They could acquire Last.fm and integrate them to iTunes, for example. I could recommend music to my friends via iTunes…

Calendars are hard! We’re still waiting for the perfect (at least good) calendar-sharing system.

Social browsing… “What should I look at today, based on recommendations of these n people I really find smart?”

Safety/privacy concerns: solutions we have in the offline world need to be emulated online.

Microformats et Bloggy Friday d'octobre [fr]

[en] Announcement for the next Bloggy Friday formatted with hCalendar microformat, and my hCard. Can you do anything interesting with them?

Octobre approche! Allez, j’annonce déjà notre prochaine rencontre:


Bloggy Friday d’octobre au Café de l’Evêché, Lausanne
6 octobre 20h00 jusqu’à tard

Rencontre mensuelle, le premier vendredi de chaque mois, des blogueurs romands ou d’ailleurs (on n’est pas sectaires!)

Inscriptions par commentaire sur le blog de Stephanie Booth (merci d’utiliser le billet annonçant l’événement, publié en général une semaine avant la rencontre).

En venant au Bloggy Friday, vous avez l’occasion de rencontrer d’autres blogueurs du coin fort sympathiques. Les nouvelles têtes sont toujours bienvenues.

Si vous êtes timides, soyez tout de même prévenus que vous courez le risque d’être photographié, blogué, — si vous ne voulez pas, il sera donc important de le faire savoir aux paparazzi présents!

This
hCalendar event brought to you by the
hCalendar Creator and modified slightly by CTTS.

Pas mal, hein? Mais ce que vous ne voyez pas au premier coup d’oeil, c’est que j’ai utilisé le microformat hCalendar pour baliser le texte ci-dessus. Jetez un coup d’oeil à la source de cette page, vous y verrez des choses…

Microformats?! késako? Allez, une petite explication de vive voix [1.7Mb, 3min38] dans mon podcast du jour. 17.09 12h30: Je viens de corriger le lien vers le podcast, merci à Anne Dominique et bouuh à tous ceux qui ne m’ont rien dit…

Et comme promis dans le podcast, my carte de visite en format hCard (attention les vélos):

Photo of Stephanie Booth.
Stephanie
Jane
Booth

Climb to the Stars
Guiguer-de-Prangins 11

Lausanne
,
VD
,
1004

Suisse

+41786254474

This hCard created with the hCard creator and modified slightly by CTTS.

Balèze, non? Ah oui, il vous faut encore essayer Tails. Tails est une extension Firefox qui permet de voir quels informations microformattées sont contenues dans une page. Si vous voulez ensuite faire quelque chose avec ces informations, n’oubliez pas d’installer les scripts Tails qui se trouve en bas de la page.

Qui arrive à importer la carte de visite hCard et l’événement hCalendar contenus dans ce billet dans son calendrier ou son carnet d’adresse? (Allez, tuyau, Technorati — entre autres — a un parseur pour hCalendar et hCard si vous ne vous en sortez pas avec Tails. Oops. En panne. OK, pas en panne, mauvaise adresse (corrigée). Mais ça semble quand même pas marcher pour moi.)

Côté podcast, mis à part les ratures habituelles, j’ai cette-fois-ci parsemé le fichier audio de liens en rapport avec ce dont je parle. Vous pouvez les voir dans iTunes (j’ai testé). Ça me rendrait service que vous me disiez ce que votre lecteur de podcasts préféré fait avec ces liens, et si ça vous est utile (ou bien est-ce que je les mets aussi dans le billet? existe-t-il un extracteur de liens de podcasts?).

Bon, allez, assez parlé. J’ai des tas de trucs à faire 🙂

S'abonner à une publication audio/video dans iTunes [fr]

[en] How to add a podcast to your iTunes podcast list: you need to copy the RSS feed address of the blog/podcast you want to subscribe to, and then in the "Advanced" menu in iTunes, select "Subscribe to podcast" and paste the URL in there.

Vous avez peut-être déjà entendu parler de podcasts. En fait, un podcast, ce n’est rien d’autre qu’un blog sous forme audio ou vidéo. Mes deux derniers billets, si l’on veut, ce sont des podcasts. Tout comme on peut s’abonner à un blog pour être averti rapidement lors d’une nouvelle publication, sans avoir à consulter compulsivement la page web du blog pour voir s’il y a du nouveau, il est possible de s’abonner au contenu audio/video d’un blog avec iTunes.

Tout d’abord, installez iTunes si vous ne l’avez pas. C’est très sympa pour écouter de la musique, transférer ses CDs sur son ordinateur, etc. Et ça n’est pas réservé aux amateurs Mac, il existe une version Windows que j’utilise d’ailleurs ces jours. Ensuite, rendez-vous sur le blog/podcast auquel vous voulez vous abonner, et copiez l’adresse du flux RSS de celui-ci. Arghl?! Pas si complique: chez moi, c’est dans la colonne de droite, en bas. Il y a un lien qui s’appelle “RSS 2.0”. On fait un ctrl-click dessus et on choisit “copier le lien” (ou quelque chose comme ça). Sur d’autres blogs, vous verrez peut-être une petite étiquette orange avec les lettres “RSS” ou “XML” dessus. Même opération.

Bref, voici l’adresse pour ce blog: https://climbtothestars.org/feed/.

Ensuite, dans iTunes, allez dans le menu “Avancé” et choisissez “s’abonner au podcast”. Dans la fenêtre qui apparaît, collez le lien que vous avez sauvegardé (faites ctrl+v si vous aimez les raccourcis clavier). Une fois que vous avez fait “OK”, le blog/podcast en question devrait apparaître dans votre liste de podcasts. Chaque nouvelle publication sera automatiquement téléchargée, et vous pourrez la consulter quand vous voulez.

Ensuite, on peut faire des trucs sympa comme s’arranger pour que les nouveaux podcasts soient automatiquement transférés sur son iPod, pour pouvoir les écouter en voiture ou dans le train, par exemple — mais je vous raconterai ça une fois que j’aurai reçu mon iPod!

iBooked! [en]

I’ve finally got my iBook up and running, and I love it! A small list of things that still cause me trouble.

I got my iBook last Tuesday. I bought a router on Thursday, and I finally got everything hooked up yesterday. I’m now happily typing away on my sofa with not a cable attached, cat snuggled up next to me, xchat running in the background while iTunes is busy ripping through my CD collection.

Things have been pretty smooth. Basically, where I’ve gone wrong, it was because I was trying to do “too much” (ie, configure my wireless connection when all I had to do was turn on the Airport Extreme card). Still getting used to some of the interface particularities, but already in love with Exposé. Here’s a status update:

  • I still haven’t found the backslash key
  • the TTS functionality that comes with OSX is really horrible
  • I need to find a good feed aggregator
  • can iTunes name my music files “Artist — Song Name” instead of just “Song Name”?
  • I need to buy ViaVoice
  • need to get my fingers trained on Mac keyboard shortcuts
  • I miss Trillian, and particularly the MetaContacts feature!
  • I now know what a Disk Image is
  • damn, can’t find a keyboard shortcut for the “Back” button in Firefox
  • what’s up with July 17th in iCal?
  • one of the first things I wanted was Dock Detox to keep my bouncing application icons sedated
  • I love Quicksilver
  • Mac people are very helpful!

I’m officially in love with my iBook.