Beneath the canopy of the social web lie 3 magnificent music sites

If savvy web trends were a forest, lurking somewhere in the shadows of the thriving microblogging grove (Twitter, Friendfeed) would be an unassuming but gorgeous patch of blossoming music sites.

One such budding site is thesixtyone.com, a music discovery place that feels as much like an RPG quest as it does a typical music site.  It cleverly incorporates social themes with a “leveling” system.  (I made level 2 in just 10 minutes!! I must be a natural).  Your participation and avant-garde taste in music helps you build experience points, making your music experience as active as you desire.  There are several “digg-like” features — the ability to bump up songs, and distinct areas for hot songs, new songs, and top songs.  On subsequent visits, small bubbles pop up and tell you various points you’ve earned since your last visit (as songs you bumped became more popular).

Then there is muxtape.com, a resplendent grid of playlists (or muxtapes) put together by users.  What makes Muxtape stand out is that its user base is an eclectic, creative bunch with experimental music tastes (though arguably genre limited).  The biggest weakness of the site is the absence of any control over the style of music to choose from.  Essentially, users are forced into a click-and-try modus operandi, which is great for exploration, but bad for seeking a specific style.

Enter muxfind.com.  If Muxtape is a colorful patch of wildflowers, then muxfind is a pollen connoisseur, perhaps a honeybee.  It provides a simple way of searching for artists or songs within muxtapes, thereby narrowing the field to playlists containing at least a single artist or song of interest (pushing up the odds of finding similar music one might fancy).

Finally, there is the hardy, perennial Hype Machine (hypem.com).  Hype Machine’s strengths are in indexing music blogs and providing to users a playable interface for songs.  Obviously, this somewhat limits Hype Machine’s library to artists or songs that are trendy at the moment.  And Hype’s algorithms should do a better job introducing variation into their “popular” playlist, which tends to be dominated by a few names (at the moment, bands like Coldplay and Vampire Weekend).

To use a platitude, this will hopefully give you a peek at the floral ground cover of the forest through the trees.

Out with Google Search, In with the New!

These days I find myself using less and less of the traditional Google search and more of other search engines. No, I’m not talking about Mahalo or some new semantic search engine. These other searches I use help me search a sub-community of the internet and hopefully avoid the vast “commercial” web. The main point of these alternative searches is to seek results from specialized, expert communities of the web, while filtering out the junk.

Let’s get right to it. Here are four powerful search engines I use in lieu of the great Google:

1) digg.com

Aha!, you say. That’s not a search engine! Well, you’re right, sort of. It is not a typical search engine in that it doesn’t index the web at large, or at least not directly. Whatever the underlying search engine (possible google?), it only directly searches digg.com stories. Of course, digg.com “indexes” nearly every cool technology article or web site published since its inception.

What makes Digg searches great is that there is very little spam mixed in. Also, you can quickly scan the search result headlines (and number of diggs) to get an idea of what the article is about. The advantage here is that someone worded the stories title in such a way to catch people’s attention and to tell the gist of the story in a few words. While great, the digg.com search could certainly use improvements - namely a better advanced search feature. For example, it would be great to only return results that had a certain number of diggs - maybe 10 or 20. Also, it might be nice to be able to include some boolean operators like NOT and OR in searches.

2) Google Blog Search

Ok, I know I said “out with Google!” in grand revolutionary fashion, but I didn’t mean it. As you’ll see, two of the four of these search methods are Google. Google Blog Search is a great blog search engine, and it seems to have replaced technorati searches (at least in my usage). The obvious advantage is that you’re hopefully avoiding commercial sites and spam, and getting to the smart people. The downside is that a lot of people with blogs ain’t too smart (present company excluded of course). Just go look how many blogs there are about NASCAR.

3) Ask Metafilter

Please don’t go around telling the Yahoo Answers users about this community. It is one of the few uncompromised intellectual stomping ground for soliciting advice. I am finding myself looking at AskMeFi, a.k.a. “the hive”, for answers more and more. It’s all about the people. The community is engaging, intelligent, and very helpful.

Ask MeFi uses Yahoo Search under the hood. There is nothing great about the search engine - in fact it’s got a majorly annoying flaw. After you search once, you have to go back or you will accidentally search the internet if you change search terms and hit search again. The real value of the search lies in the brilliant answers given by the community. I especially recommend this one for searches about social and personal issues (e.g., relationships, places, events), although the technology answers are excellent as well. Highly recommended.

4) Google Reader Search

This is both the newest of the four and my personal favorite. The key with this one, though, is that have built up an impressive OPML. (I can already see the “My OPML is bigger than yours” t-shirts.) Basically this just means that you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds.

By subscribing to a lot of really good RSS feeds (mostly blogs of course), Google Reader will search specifically through the articles in your feeds, ensuring that no crap comes up from some schmuck with a NASCAR blog. Essentially, this becomes like a Google Blog Search, but it only searches blogs that you have approved ahead of time! So if you have an extensive group of feeds in Google Reader, you should definitely enjoy this one.

Twitter for Political Debates?

Today I saw a rather serious twitter post, an argument in the form of a debate response.  This struck me for two reasons: first, I’m used to seeing “tweets” (twitter posts) about what shaving cream a person uses or how they just ate a twinkie.  This tweet was different - it was an intelligent comment on a serious topic (gasp!)!  Second, the tweet stood out as something you might see in a fast debate.  It was brief, efficient, and direct.  Kind of the opposite of what we’ve grown accustomed to witnessing in political debate.

This raised the question - what if candidates agreed to conduct a debate over an online medium like Twitter, their answers limited to 140 characters (or some other apposite number)?  We might see something unprecedented - straight answers about issues.  Given that Twitter is already being used by a presidential candidate, maybe it’s not that absurd.

Twitter + Fiction = Twiction

Flash fiction is a style of fiction that is extremely short, and thus, every word is important. If you’ve never tried writing flash fiction, try it sometime - you have to scrutinize every word and sentence, and decide if their was a more efficient way to say it. Wikipedia says that flash fiction is usually between 250 and 1000 words.

Enter Twiction. In a Twitter post, the maximum number of characters allowed is 140. That’s CHARACTERS, not words. Obviously, this is part of the beauty of Twitter - it doesn’t let you screw around. You need to get to the point in a hurry or you’ll find yourself stuck with more to say but nowhere to say it.

So can you tell a story in 140 characters?? I doubt it, but it won’t stop me from trying. I’ll post my first attempt here.

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Update: I posted this to twitter just now.

“He sat thinking, how had he killed his wife? It couldn’t be the sex. He remembered the kiss, the taste - bitter. Her eyes were wild. Poison.”

Exactly 140 characters. Ok so it’s not really a story, but can you blame me for trying?

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Update 2: Just stumbled on twitterfic.googlepages.com - someone already had the idea for Twitter Fiction.  Props - I like your idea

Diagramming as a Skill

We’ve all been there. You’re sitting in a discussion where someone is trying to explain a complex problem or concept, but they’re not doing such a good job and the audience is full of blank stares. Then someone else - or maybe the person originally explaining - grabs a marker and starts drawing a diagram on the white board. As they lay out the concept at a high level, something about the simplicity and being able to see the concept visually allows your mind to easily grab the info. Then as the person moves on to more complex parts of the concept, you can move with them knowing that the diagram remains as a fallback position. In other words, the diagram helps to “abstract away” part of the system and let you dig into another piece. For a deep-dive, read more about how diagramming helps people understand complex concepts.

People that can make complex concepts simple are genius. I have spoken to countless people who can do the reverse, and turn a simple programming idea into a jumble of non-linear, unnecessarily technical rambles. Occasionally, I meet someone who can take something that I had previously been confounded by and turn it into something attainable - even simple. Very often these people use either (1) stories (or examples) and (2) pictures and diagrams. Ok, so there are probably some others, but these are the most common.

As part of my attempt to get better at making the complex simple, I have started diagramming more often. At work, I find myself drawing out everything (and I really think it helps, even if people find it self-indulgent). A colleague of mine is fond of mind mapping, and his mindmaps have come in handy on several occasions. Recently, I found a use for some personal mind mapping and came across a great startup called bubbl.us. At this point, bubbl.us doesn’t yet allow you to save your diagrams as an image file, but they almost certainly will add this feature soon. As a bonus, bubbl.us also offers a WordPress widget.

Go diagram!